Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book

Child blowing out candle on the brown bear cake (1986)

There are 108 themed cakes appearing in the original edition, "largely composed of packet butter cake mix, Vienna cream icing and lollies".[3] 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".[4] Some of the more well-known are:[5][6]

In a September 2018 Throwback: Our Childhoods Revisited series interview, Pamela Clark noted the heirloom quality of the cookbook, with old copies being passed down in families for generations of cake-making.[7]

Recreation of the "train cake"
Credit: Ginger Gorman

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.[8]

Clark was inspired to create the cookbook after creating a tyrannosaurus-cake for a neighbour in 1978, but despite this inspiration, no dinosaur-themes cakes were included in the eventual publication.[3] The first edition was printed in 1980 and a "vintage" edition of the book was published in 2011[1] — being reprinted four times in the first six months with initial sales of 100,000 copies.[2] As of 2015, the 2011 edition is in the circulating collection of over 40 public libraries across the country[9] while the original edition (in various reprints) remains in circulation in 27.[10] Four of the original recipes featuring cartoon characters were removed from the 2011 edition due to the publisher no longer having a license.[2] First editions can sell on eBay for 12 times their original price.[1]

External video

2018 interview with Pamela Clark[11]

Pamela Clark demonstrates how to make "The train cake"[12]

Australian demographer Bernard Salt has suggested that the book modernised and "grandified" children's birthday party culture in Australia.[13] 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[14] and the publisher's test kitchen had a dedicated, much-used telephone help-line for parents making the cakes to a deadline.[15]

Because of the appealing decorative effects of the cakes, the book has garnered a nostalgic cult following including social media fan groups and projects to reproduce each cake.[6] 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,[16] a show that continued through to 2015.[17] In 2016 all 107 cakes were baked and sold for a Canberra charity to raise money to support women with post- and ante-natal depression.[18][19] In 2018 New Zealand born photographer Henry Hargreaves created an exhibition in Wellington 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.[20]

In 2020, the book turned 40 and co-author 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.”[21]