Aerial Cakes & Repeaters
The difference between an aerial cake and a repeater is the aerial cakes focus only on firing aerial effect tubes (small aerial shells or "inserts") but repeaters can be repeater fountains, repeater mines, etc. The aerial cake works like many small aerial shells and mortar tubes in a bundle that are fired with small intervals. The internal fusing repeatedly ignites the lift charges in timed intervals, so all of the small effect tubes inside are shot out. The lift powder lights the effect tube's time fuse. Now, the time fuse ignites the star composition at the bottom which gives the effect tube a beautiful tail as it goes up. When the effect tube reaches its peak, the time fuse lights the burst charge which blows out the stars (or effects) and ignites them at the same time.