Eumundi Voice Issue 121, 10 July 2025

ON THIS DAY

Cake can be a

International Cake Day is on 10 July. This year marks the 45th anniversary of the release of The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book, with its 108 recipes. Between its launch in 1980 and a vintage edition in 2011, the book sold more than 1M copies. On the cover of the original book was the train cake. Many children would have surveyed the pages selecting their favourite birthday cake with plenty to choose from including a castle cake, a rubber ducky cake and even a swimming pool cake – filled with jelly and tiny swimming figures. Co-Author Pamela Clark said children would take the book to bed as bedtime reading, choosing the cake their parents would bake for their birthday. A number of the cakes seemed to be engineering puzzles and the publisher’s test kitchen had a dedicated telephone helpline for parents making the cakes to a deadline. In 2020, Australian TV show Bluey featured the very-hard-to-make rubber ducky cake. In 2023, when Bendigo Art Gallery curated an exhibition on the cultural impact of the Australian Women’s Weekly, they received over 3,000 images from the public of cakes made from The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book. What was your childhood favourite?