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Susie O’Brien: Why children’s birthday cakes are no longer about the kids

BIRTHDAY cakes are supposed to be for the kids but social media has changed what is supposed to be a simple celebration into a chance to impress other parents, writes Susie O’Brien.

IT’S harder than ever to be a parent these days.

Teachers at schools have been renamed “learning designers”. Kids are fined for not wearing sports uniforms, but lunch box food has to be nude.

And we’re supposed to ask permission from a baby before changing its nappy.

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And yet the real measure of parenting success lies elsewhere. It’s the dreaded birthday cake test.

Are you delivering your five-year-old a nine-turret, three-tier Tangled birthday cake with fondant icing and candied figurines? Top marks!

Or is it a supermarket Victoria sponge ($7 plus 15c bag) roughed up to look homemade? Fail!

Of course, there are bonus marks for those who not only manage to make showstopper cakes but find time to humble-brag about them on social media.

Take this post showing one mum’s mastery of the Wilton Castle cake which features 24 turrets, six windows and a door: “Hardest cake I’ve made so far! I never want to make another castle ever again. Hope the birthday girl likes it. :) TFL!”

The Australian Women’s Weekly candy castle cake would not meet today’s parenting standards. Picture: AWW/Bauer Media
The Australian Women’s Weekly candy castle cake would not meet today’s parenting standards. Picture: AWW/Bauer Media

It’s kind of like those posts where women pose in some tropical location with their feet by a pool with the caption, “Should have got a pedicure #tropicalparadise”.

#Showoff is more like it.

This week’s cake obsession started with my determination to give a six-year-old girl a great cake. My standby is an ice-cream cake with two-litres of cheapie vanilla melted into a cake tin and topped with a tower of pre-frozen ice-cream balls in different colours.

Top it with ice magic (covers all the mistakes) and put it on a round tray packed with lollies and shards of melted chocolate. I ripped off the idea from a well-known ice-cream shop because I once refused to pay $85 for a kid’s birthday cake.

It’s big, easy and takes no baking. The only problem was that last weekend, the 13 five and six-year-olds took too long to play pass the parcel and the cake started to melt.

Let me tell you, a tower-construction ice-cream cake isn’t all that forgiving.

I took to Facebook to lament my #cakefail (I know hashtag is for Twitter but whatevs) when I was struck by the level of concern expressed by some of my friends.

“Oh dear,” said one.

“Your pen is mightier than your spatula,” said another.

At that point, I started getting a little antsy. I rang my daughter. “Text me that photo of that really good cake I did for you last year,” I said. “Now. Hurry up.”

Suddenly, it was very important for me to show I wasn’t a complete birthday cake moron. I cared A LOT about what people thought. Too much, in fact. Luckily, I’ve got a few parties under my belt.

I know you can’t use cheap snakes in red jelly cups because they seep their colour and look like dead man’s fingers suspended in blood.

I know not to make a chocolate cake covered in desiccated coconut — it looks like guy with dandruff left his wig on the table.

And I know rainbow cakes seem like a good idea but invariably look as if a kid ate fairy bread, then threw up in a patty pan.

We were discussing kids’ parties at work.

“So, should you drink at your kids’ birthday parties?” one mum asked me.

“It’s not only advisable, it’s imperative,” I told her.

Birthday cakes are supposed to be all about the kids, but they’re increasingly all about the parents’ need to impress a whole bunch of people on social media they’ve never met but whom they think are much better cake makers than they are.

Remember the classic pool cake? Picture: Australian Women's Weekly
Remember the classic pool cake? Picture: Australian Women's Weekly

(Or maybe it’s just me.)

Many of us grew up dreaming about birthday cakes from the Women’s Weekly cookbook. Mums would pull out dog-eared copies of the book and ask their kids to pick which one they wanted. If your mum didn’t manage to produce the train cake, or the pool cake with jelly on top or the farmyard with TeeVee snacks around the edge, she didn’t love you enough.

By the time the party came around, she’d be a blithering mess and the cake would have fingerprints all over it from little siblings wanting a taste.

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It seemed like a big deal, but the cakes were pretty basic in today’s terms. They were often packet cake mixes with butter cream and lots of lollies. But it was still a lot of pressure: one friend told me she found out years later her mother had glued some of the book’s pages together so they wouldn’t choose the hard cakes.

These days, a whole industry has grown up around birthday cakes. I can’t get enough of TV shows like Nailed It!, which shows home bakers getting it wrong, to websites full of cakes mucked up by professionals. Try cakewrecks.com which shows cakes with icing that says things like: “Fist Holy Communion”, “It’s 10.30 and I’m tired, so here’s your bloody cake” and “Find the toenail”. Sometimes the cakes have “Happy Birthday Darling in Curly Writing” written on them in curly writing.

Oh well, as that old Burger Rings ad used to say: Tastes good but.

— Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist

susan.obrien@news.com.au

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Original URL: https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/susie-obrien/susie-obrien-why-childrens-birthday-cakes-are-no-longer-about-the-kids/news-story/fc4f88cc12ffd03612a90326efa92990