Though I don't remember this 1951 ad for from my own childhood, I do remember Pillsbury cake mixes. Birthdays in our house usually were marked with a cake just large enough for the immediate family, made from a boxed mix like the one shown here. This was an era when there weren't bakery departments in every supermarket with sheet-cakes pre-decorated with images of Sponge Bob or Cinderella.
In the 50's, if you wanted a custom cake, you had two options. You could go to a bakery where you'd order a cake in advance. Or, if you had the prerequisite skills, you could make one from scratch and decorate it as you pleased. If a bakery cake was too expensive and you didn't have the chops to create a lovely three-layer cake from flour, eggs, and sugar, then you fell back on the new wave of convenience products like boxed cake mixes.
I find products like these interesting. The fifties weren't an era of upward mobility for women. A young woman, coming of age in 1951 had few career avenues open to her: she could become a teacher, she could become a nurse, or she could become a housewife with the third being the prescribed route. So why care about something like saving time when baking a cake? Why wasn't it expected that a woman, a housewife, take the time to bake from scratch instead of falling back on a packaged mix? Because prejudice can only stand so long? Not being a sociologist, I can't say.
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