Food & Drinks

The best of The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book

The cult classic has been around since the '80s and it's like a photo album of all our childhoods.
swimming pool cake

swimming pool cake

swimming pool cake

The Australian Women’s Weekly’s Children’s Birthday Cake Book has been around for almost four decades now and has officially reached cult classic status.

Why do we love it so much?

“Because the recipes look approachable. They’re a bit messy, they’re not styled or polished and they’re just a bit of fun, which resonates with Australian families,” says Pamela Clark, who worked on 60 of the cakes at the time and is currently Food Director at Bauer Books. (Bauer Media is the publisher of The Australian Women’s Weekly)

The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book first hit shelves in 1980 and now sits in more than a million homes around New Zealand and Australia.

Due to such a high demand for those nostalgic recipes It was re-released in 2011 because when they suddenly disappeared, many Aussies and Kiwis were forced to trawl through eBay and Trade Me to find a second-hand copy.

“The release of the vintage edition was due to me nagging my various bosses (over many years) and begging them to re-release the book,” says Pamela. “We had countless requests for the reprint, despite the fact that we’d done quite a few kids cake books since ‘the book with the train on the cover’.”

Click through for the top 10 most iconic children’s birthday cakes from The Australian Women’s Weekly.

Humpty Dumpty

Beautiful butterfly

Racing car track

Number one

Sweets shop

Candy Castle

Rubber Ducky

Dolly Varden

Swimming Pool

Choo-choo train

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