Two games, both showing a cake, both promising you will make one. In one of them you will mix a batter, wait for an oven and split a cooled sponge into layers. In the other the cake is already there and you will never touch a bowl. The screenshots are nearly identical and the difference decides whether you enjoy the next ten minutes.
What each one is actually about
A baking game is about sequence. Things have to happen in an order, and the order has consequences that the game shows you: frosting a warm cake makes the cream slump, an overfilled case spills across the tray, cookies placed too close merge into one sheet. The pleasure is procedural. You are being taught a process, and the finished object is proof you followed it.
A decorating game is about composition. The base is given, nothing can fail, and the interesting decisions are all visual — which colour goes down first, whether the piping happens before the glitter, whether the candles sit in the middle or the design is built around them. The pleasure is compositional, and the finished object is a picture rather than a proof.
How to tell before you click
The description usually gives it away in the first sentence. If it starts with ingredients, it is a baking game. If it starts with the finished item and lists what you can put on it, it is a decorating game. On this site the two live in separate sections for exactly this reason, and each game page says which stages it contains.
The hybrid case
A fair number of titles do both, and badly: thirty seconds of perfunctory mixing followed by ten minutes of toppings. There is nothing wrong with that as long as you know it is what you are getting — the mixing is the excuse and the decorating is the game. Those titles are filed under decorating here, because that is where the time goes.
The reverse hybrid is rarer and worth seeking out: a real bake with a real decorating stage at the end, where the sponge you carefully cooled is the thing you then have to make look like something.
