australian womens weekly childrens

The Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book and Facebook

When I was a kid my favourite book (apart from the Famous Five books

and all the Usborne Puzzle Adventures) was the Australian Women's

Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book. I would spend hours reading it

like it was a picture book, fantasising about which cake I should beg

Mum to make me on my next birthday.

I had very firm opinions regarding the cakes featured in the book: the

Candle cake was too boring, I loved the Bunny Rabbit and Robert Robot

cakes, I didn't like the ice cream cakes, and was simultaneously

repulsed yet fascinated by the concept of the Swimming Pool cake

featuring plastic dolls with jube swimrings swimming in GREEN JELLY

under the shade of a snazzy cocktail umbrella. With the notable

exception of the Candy Castle (which Mum made me for my sixth birthday

when we were living in London - those British kids had never seen

anything like it!), I thought the cakes "For Boys" were much cooler

than the cakes "For Girls" - who wants a freaking Sewing Machine or

Maypole/Ballerina cake when you could have a Rocketship or a Tip Truck

laden with lollies?!

In January this year I was talking with my friend C about childhood

memories and I mentioned how I'd always wanted the Piano cake from the

AWWCBCB. Wonderful wonderful friend that she is, she showed up at my

(ahem) 27th birthday party a few weeks later carrying the cake you see

on your right, complete with a handmade candelabra (which still sits

proudly on my mantelpiece) and miniature bound sheet music to Rock

Lobster.

It was the BEST present!! :)

So fast-forward to May this year when I jumped on the facebook

bandwagon. Having joined a few food-related facebook groups such as

the excellent "top melbourne restaurants" (lots of good

recommendations!) and "I wish Yum Cha trolleys would circulate through

my place of work", I created a group called "The Women's Weekly

Birthday Cake Book is awesome" and invited C and a few of my friends

to join it for a bit of a laugh, thinking the whole thing would fizzle

out after a week or two.

But lo and behold, I hadn't realised that the book had struck a chord

with so many people! Gradually, more and more people, almost all of

whom I don't know, started joining the group... 50..... 150... 500...

and today the group reached 1000 members! In honour of that milestone

I thought I'd blog about the group here today.

Popular topics in the group have been Choo-Choo Train envy (the train,

pictured on the cover, looks the most difficult to make of all the

cakes, so is therefore the most coveted), the merits of the updated

version of the book (featuring a Magic Toadstool cake on the cover)

versus the original, and of course the love-hate relationship we all

have with the Rubber Ducky cake (pictured left), with his bizarre

popcorn afro, scary eyeliner and salty chip beak. What I really like

about the group is that as well as sharing their birthday cake

memories, people have been posting photos of their AWW-inspired cakes,

both from their childhoods and from the present (including one member

who posted a photo of two little boys posing with the train cake in

the mid 80s, then posted a present-day photo which recreated the

original, featuring the same two boys (now grown) and a new train

cake!). The group has over 75 photos that have been sent in!

I thought it best not to post other members' photos here on my blog

without permission, so these are photos of cakes my brother and I were

lucky enough to have made for us by Mum in the 1980s (and yes, Buster

loved the Cricket Pitch cake he had for his sixth birthday SO MUCH

that he had it again for his eighth birthday). But if you're on

facebook, drop by the group and check out the other photos, they're

very cute!

P.S. Next time I'll write about the other group I created ("I ate at

David and Camy's Shanghai Dumpling and survived (but only just)") and