Backe, backe Kuchen

Bake, bake a cake: the baker has called out. Anyone who wants to bake a good cake needs seven things: eggs and lard, butter and salt, milk and flour. Saffron makes the cake yellow. ("Gehl" is an old form of "gelb", yellow.)

Sit the baby on your lap and clap the baby's hands together on the beat while you say the rhyme. Many families end by swinging the baby's arms forward, as if sliding the cake into the oven; the rhyme works just as well without that last move.

Known across German-speaking lands, this rhyme was passed on by voice long before it was written down. A German folk-song archive places it in Saxony and Thuringia before 1840 and lists several 19th-century printings. The ingredients are named in a litany that echoes an old German recipe from about 1450, although that recipe was for porridge and not a child's rhyme. A common explanation links the opening to the baker's call that told neighbours the oven's leftover heat was free; this is likely but not proven.