Recipe Revivals: Vintage recipe art celebrates cake history!

Alt text: "Three vintage recipe cards with images of cakes and baked goods. Each card features an illustrative and detailed baking recipe."

Art that tells the sweet stories of Swans Down.

At Swans Down, we consider a good cake recipe to be a piece of family history – and so do our friends at Recipe Revivals. They give second life as wall art to illustrated pages from antique and vintage cookbooks and cocktail manuals – and many of their creations come from vintage Swans Down recipe books going back to the early 1900s. These transformed, framed recipe illustrations are a gorgeous way to celebrate the beauty of our baking traditions – one light, fluffy cake at a time.

recipe revivals art made with vintage swans down cake recipes

The cakes our great grandmothers baked.

Their vintage recipe wall art dives deep into American baking and culinary history with images of cakes popular in the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and beyond. Each piece invites you to imagine the birthdays, baby showers and holidays celebrated with these beautifully illustrated cakes – and honors the generations of bakers who’ve trusted Swans Down, since 1894.

They got started when a friend gave them a cook book from the 1960s. They stapled several of the illustration pages to a bulletin board, creating a collage that people who saw it over the years got really excited about. They decided to research other cook books and discovered that during the first quarter of the 20th century, cook books had gorgeous illustrations! One of the first booklets they found was a Swans Down book called Cake Secrets, published in 1925. And the rest, as they say, is history!