''The Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book'' is a

recipe book A cookbook or cookery book is a kitchen reference containing recipes. Cookbooks may be general, or may specialize in a particular cuisine or category of food. Recipes in cookbooks are organized in various ways: by course (appetizer, first cou ...

focused on children's-themed

birthday cake A birthday cake is a cake eaten as part of a birthday celebration. Birthday cakes are often layer cakes with frosting served with small lit candles on top representing the celebrant's age. Variations include cupcakes, cake pops, pastries, an ...

s published as part of ''

The Australian Women's Weekly ''The Australian Women's Weekly'', sometimes known as simply ''The Weekly'', is an Australian monthly women's magazine published by Mercury Capital in Sydney. For many years it was the number one magazine in Australia before being outsold by ...

'' magazine cookbook series by

Australian Consolidated Press Are Media is an Australian media company that was formed after the 2020 purchase of the assets of Bauer Media Australia, which had in turn acquired the assets of Pacific Magazines, AP Magazines and Australian Consolidated Press during the 201 ...

, written by Maryanne Blacker and

Pamela Clark Pamela Clark (born 1944) is an Australian chef, cookbook author and food presenter, and has been associated with ''The Australian Women's Weekly'' for 50 years. Early life Clark spent her preschool years living on Aneityum, Vanuatu, due to ...

. First published in 1980 and re-released in 2011, it has become an "Australian cult classic" and a "publishing phenomenon". Between its launch in 1980 and its relaunch in 2011, the book sold more than a million copies, despite having been out of print for a significant portion of that period. During the 1970s and 80s, ''The Australian Women's Weekly'' was among the highest-selling magazines in Australia and published a wide range of titles for cake decorating, recipe and meal ideas in both book and magazine form.

Themes and designs

There are 108 themed cakes appearing in the original edition, "largely composed of packet

butter cake A butter cake is a cake in which one of the main ingredients is butter. Butter cake is baked with basic ingredients: butter, sugar, eggs, flour, and leavening agents such as baking powder or baking soda. It is considered one of the quintessentia ...

mix, Vienna cream icing and lollies", although "for the over-achiever", the book offers a recipe for fresh butter cake at the front. The cover illustration is of the "train cake", for which it became synonymous — the cookbook is sometimes referred to as "the book with the train on the cover". The swimming pool cake — a construction filled with jelly and tiny swimming figures — has been referred to as "the crowning glory" because to a parent, it seemed so difficult to engineer. Some of the better-known cakes are: * Choo-choo train (cover image), featuring popcorn * Swimming pool, featuring green jelly, typically

Aeroplane Jelly Aeroplane Jelly is a jelly brand in Australia created in 1927 by Bert Appleroth. Appleroth's backyard business, Traders Pty Ltd, became one of Australia's largest family-operated food manufacturers and was sold to McCormick Foods Australia, ...

* Jack in the box * Piano * Castle, featuring

meringue Meringue (, ; ) is a type of dessert or candy, often associated with Swiss, French, Polish and Italian cuisines, traditionally made from whipped egg whites and sugar, and occasionally an acidic ingredient such as lemon, vinegar, or cream o ...

* Clock *

Racetrack A race track (racetrack, racing track or racing circuit) is a facility built for racing of vehicles, athletes, or animals (e.g. horse racing or greyhound racing). A race track also may feature grandstands or concourses. Race tracks are also use ...

, figure-8 shape * Robot * Lion * Good witch * Farmyard * Miss Muffet * Cricket bat * Cricket field * Dolly Varden *

Miss Piggy Miss Piggy is one of the Muppet characters known for her breakout role in Jim Henson's ''The Muppet Show''. Since her debut in 1976, Miss Piggy has been notable for her temperamental diva superstar personality, tendency to use French phrases i ...

Humpty dumpty Humpty Dumpty is a character in an English nursery rhyme, probably originally a riddle and one of the best known in the English-speaking world. He is typically portrayed as an anthropomorphic egg, though he is not explicitly described as such. ...

* Duck, featuring

chips ''CHiPs'' is an American crime drama television series created by Rick Rosner and originally aired on NBC from September 15, 1977, to May 1, 1983. It follows the lives of two motorcycle officers of the California Highway Patrol (CHP). The seri ...

* Pirate * Rubber ducky * Shark * Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe *

Echidna Echidnas (), sometimes known as spiny anteaters, are quill-covered monotremes (egg-laying mammals) belonging to the family Tachyglossidae . The four extant species of echidnas and the platypus are the only living mammals that lay eggs and the ...

Koala The koala or, inaccurately, koala bear (''Phascolarctos cinereus''), is an arboreal herbivorous marsupial native to Australia. It is the only extant representative of the family Phascolarctidae and its closest living relatives are the w ...

* Giraffe * Ghost *

Gingerbread house Gingerbread refers to a broad category of baked goods, typically flavored with ginger, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon and sweetened with honey, sugar, or molasses. Gingerbread foods vary, ranging from a moist loaf cake to forms nearly as crisp as ...

Hopscotch Hopscotch is a popular playground game in which players toss a small object, called a lagger, into numbered triangles or a pattern of rectangles outlined on the ground and then hop or jump through the spaces and retrieve the object. It is a ch ...

* Pink elephant * Typewriter * Butterfly

Publication history

Some of the cakes featured in a Children's Party Foods -themed lift-out in September 1974. This included a ''Cowboys and Indians'' cake which looked very similar to the later ''Farmyard'', and the ''Hickory Dickory Clock'', later named ''Clock''. Clark was inspired to create the cookbook after creating a

tyrannosaurus ''Tyrannosaurus'' is a genus of large theropod dinosaur. The species ''Tyrannosaurus rex'' (''rex'' meaning "king" in Latin), often called ''T. rex'' or colloquially ''T-Rex'', is one of the best represented theropods. ''Tyrannosaurus'' live ...

-cake for a neighbour in 1978, but despite this inspiration, no dinosaur-themes cakes were included in the eventual publication. The first edition was printed in 1980, and a "vintage" edition of the book was published in 2011 — being reprinted four times in the first six months with initial sales of 100,000 copies. As of 2015, the 2011 edition is in the circulating collection of over 40 public libraries across the country while the original edition (in various reprints) remains in circulation in 27. Four of the original recipes featuring

cartoon characters In fiction, a character (or speaker, in poetry) is a person or other being in a narrative (such as a novel, play, radio or television series, music, film, or video game). The character may be entirely fictional or based on a real-life person, ...

were removed from the 2011 edition due to the publisher no longer having a license. First editions can sell on

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for 12 times their original price.

Influence

Australian demographer Bernard Salt has suggested that the book modernised and "grandified" children's birthday party culture in Australia. The author, Pamela Clark, has said that children would take the book to bed with them as bedtime reading, choosing which cake their parents would make for them, and the publisher's test kitchen had a dedicated, much-used telephone help-line for parents making the cakes to a deadline. Because of the appealing decorative effects of the cakes, the book has garnered a

nostalgic Nostalgia is a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. The word ''nostalgia'' is a learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of (''nóstos''), meaning "homecoming", a Homeric wo ...

cult following including

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fan groups and projects to reproduce each cake. In 2009, stand-up comedian Josh Earl included reference to the "train cake" in his routine. The segment was so popular he expanded it and the following year launched ''Josh Earl vs. the Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book'', a show that continued through to 2015. In 2016 all 107 cakes were baked and sold for a Canberra charity to raise money to support women with

post- ''Post-'' (stylized in all caps) is the third solo album by American singer-songwriter Jeff Rosenstock. It was released on January 1, 2018, without any promotional lead-up. The album was released on Polyvinyl Record Co. in the United States an ...

and ante-natal depression. In 2018 New Zealand born photographer Henry Hargreaves created an exhibition in

Wellington Wellington ( mi, Te Whanganui-a-Tara or ) is the capital city of New Zealand. It is located at the south-western tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Remutaka Range. Wellington is the second-largest city in New Zealand by metr ...

called "Birthdays that will never come" celebrating children who would never have birthdays in New Zealand, by combining children's names that are banned in New Zealand with the "very 80s aesthetic" of the cakes in the cookbook, familiar to him from childhood. In a September 2018 interview on ''Throwback: Our Childhoods Revisited'' series, co-author Pamela Clark noted the heirloom quality of the cookbook, with old copies being passed down in families for generations of cake-making. In 2020, the book turned 40 and Clark noted that its 106 recipes have been birthday party staples ever since its first publication. Despite the elaborate cakes featured on the internet, "you get these... daggy cakes... and they're more popular than all of the upmarket ones." In the first half of 2020, in the context of the

COVID-19 pandemic in Australia The COVID-19 pandemic in Australia is part of the ongoing worldwide pandemic of the coronavirus disease 2019 () caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (). The first confirmed case in Australia was identified on 25 Januar ...

, sales of the book increased by about 30%. The change was attributed to people being more at home as well as to nostalgia in difficult times. The book, and the difficult-to-make "duck cake", were the subject of an episode of the popular Australian children's television show ''Bluey'' in 2020.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book 1980 books 1980 in Australia 1980s in Australia Australian cookbooks Media about cakes