Songfacts®:

• This 78 second, steamy album interlude finds Rihanna getting downright filthy as she expresses her desire to have spontaneous sex. In case you haven't noticed the cake in question is not one you stick candles on, but a metaphor for a certain region of the female anatomy.
• The Bajan singer is not the first pop artist to indulge in some birthday-themed naughtiness, though Jeremih was more upfront with the title of his 2009 hit "Birthday Sex."
• The song was helmed by The-Dream together with Kosine and Tuo, who are the production/ writing team known collectively as Da Internz.
• A full length version of the song was released in 2012 featuring Chris Brown. The R&B singer-songwriter contributed two verses; one where he's singing and another where he's rapping. It was the first time that Rihanna had worked with her former boyfriend since he beat her up in the street after a pre-Grammys party three years previously.
• The-Dream recalled to Sway on MTV's RapFix Live getting the original call from Rihanna about the Chris Brown featuring remix while driving in Miami. "I think I'm gonna put Chris on it," he recalled the Bajan singer saying to him over the phone. "I don't know which Chris you talkin' about, [but] OK, cool, whatever you say," was The-Dream's response.
  
  The-Dream had to come to grips with the situation once he came to realization that the Chris she was collaborating with was the one who assaulted Rihanna three years previously. "She's pretty smart too. The same questions that went through my mind, and I'm an artist also, had to have gone through hers," he told RapFix Live. "When she raised the question to me, I know she's not crazy. So my thought was you've been thinking about this, you've already thought it out, so evidently you know what reaction you gonna get."
• The remix was recorded and fine-tuned quickly, so it could be debuted on February 20, 2012, Rihanna's 24th birthday. "Within like the last week-and-a-half [it was recorded]," the-Dream disclosed to The Boombox. "It hasn't been that long. It's quick. We had just finished it that day on her birthday in London.
• The remix marks the first collaboration from the two singers since their collaboration on the remix to Rihanna's 2007 single "Umbrella".
• Rihanna spoke to Ryan Seacrest on his US radio station KIIS FM about why she collaborated with Chris Brown on the song's remix: "I reached out to him about doing 'Birthday Cake' because that's the only person that really made sense to do the record," she said. The singer added: "I thought about rappers, and I've done that so many times, and the hottest R&B artist out right now is Chris Brown. So I wanted him on the track. Just as a musician, despite everything else, that was going to be the person."
• Rihanna admitted that some of her filthiest lyrics on Talk That Talk were written while she was without a man. Speaking to The Sun she said that her feelings of frustration inspired her sauciest songs. RiRi said: "My last album Talk That Talk was true to where my head was at that moment, like all my albums. I was having a lot of naughty thoughts - because I wasn't getting any action. That came out in the music."