I grew up admiring the Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake cookbook. For any child growing up in the 80s, this would have been a staple cookbook in your home. I would flick through the pages, choosing which ones I would want for my birthday and then ask my mum for it. I am not sure if it’s just a bad memory – but I can’t recall actually getting one though lol Nevermind. I am fairly certain my friends got some at their parties so therefore I got to have some of their special, classic cake.
So when I was sent through a picture from a customer requesting a cake from this cult-classic cookbook I got very excited. Even if it wasn’t for me, I was so excited to be bringing something from my generation, something I hold dear to my heart, to this little girl to have for her birthday. This particular cake was a favourite of mine when I was a little girl and so it was lovely to hear that she actually wanted this design.
If you happen to have a copy of the book (I bought my Vintage edition just the other year lol), you will find it on about the 64th page. I think I did pretty well to replicate it!
The cake itself was a 2-layer pink dairy-free, soy-free and nut-free vanilla buttercake, frosted with dairy-free buttercream. I am fairly certain I have already mentioned how to go about getting this: sub out regular milk for rice milk, and butter for Nutellex. My local Woolies now stocks the Buttery variety – I highly recommend this version for cakes. You simply can’t go past having that butter flavour!
In addition to the style of the cake, it was requested that the cake be accompanied by Frozen figurines. Easy enough when the local cake supplies store carries them in stock. Knowing that they are so popular, I got my hands on them as soon as I could so I wouldn’t miss out when the time came to make the cake. I didn’t want to overwhelm the top of the cake with too much because I wanted to honour the simpleness of the original design, so I decided to only add Elsa and Anna to the top and keep the rest of the characters on the board itself. (I couldn’t help but sing the the Summer song to myself while placing Olaf onto the board hehe).
Taking this cake to the Frozen theme, I added some gumpaste snowflakes as well as some edible glitter. I think it worked fairly well.
By the way, for those that are wanting to make this cake for yourself, pro tip: get yourself 3 of the closed star tips to do the piping. It saved my sanity being able to set up the 3 different colours in 3 different bags and just pipe away each row consecutively. Otherwise, if you only have the one tip, you would want to have a coupler on each bag and clean the tip before moving it to the next bag for each new row 🙂
I’m so glad I got to make this cake, it was a lot of fun and one that will always be close to my heart. (See what I did there? ;))