Jill Evans, who was inspired by her baker grandparents, developed a love for pastry cooking and went to a culinary school.

[8] Each level takes place in a different month, and holiday-themed customers appear such as Cupid and Santa Claus in February and December, respectively.

[21] The Nintendo DS port was developed by Digital Embryo and published by Majesco Entertainment (US) and Eidos Interactive (Europe),[14] and was first exhibited at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show.

[18] Cake Mania was developed and published on Java ME-supported phones[24] in March 2007 by Mr.Goodliving Studios, a subsidiary of RealNetworks.

[27] In September 2007, several months after the release of Cake Mania for phones running Java ME, RealNetworks published a press release stating that the port was successful, writing that Cake Mania was "one of the most downloaded mobile games in the U.S.," on the mobile platform at the time.

[25] Cake Mania was released on Mac OS in September 2007, and was developed by Red Marble Games.

[9] The PlayStation 2 version was published by Destineer and developed by Coresoft, and released on August 15, 2008 in the United States.

[36][3][37] Many reviewers compared Cake Mania to other service industry-related time management games such as Diner Dash[28][39][24] or Tapper.

[2][37] IGN criticized the DS version for 'lack of depth' aside from a "rising difficulty curve", but praised its "cute" graphics.

[2] IGN expressed that while simple and repetitive, Cake Mania is a good 'casual' game, summarizing it as "fun but shallow".

[14] Joystiq described Cake Mania as shovelware due to its "lack of depth" and simplistic gameplay, summarizing it as "not as bad as everyone made it out to be but still not fantastic".

[42] 1up.com criticized Cake Mania's overly simple and repetitive gameplay, stating that its somewhat fun "if you don't have a ton of other better things to do".

[16][19] 1up.com described the Wii version as "an exercise in frustration" due to the game's controls as well as its "glitchy" interface, further stating that "onscreen items overlap with the menus, rendering them mostly unusable".

[19] 1up.com criticized In the Mix's "repetitive" multiplayer and endless modes, expressing that they amplify the issues present in single-player, further calling them "hardly playable".

[8] Macworld gave the Macintosh version of Cake Mania a mixed review, and was divided on its casual gameplay, calling it a good "time-waster", but also noted that it "can get pretty exhausting and downright frustrating before too long" due to its difficulty curve.

[45] Reviewers commented that the sequel didn't add much compared to the original, and that the Nintendo DS version had issues with the small screen and touchscreen controls.