The Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book (or simply AWWCBCB) is a popular recipe book focused on children's-themed birthday cakes published as part of The Australian Women's Weekly magazine cookbook series by Australian Consolidated Press, written by Maryanne Blacker and Pamela Clark. First published in 1980 and re-released in 2011, its cultural impact has been variously described as an "Australian cult classic", a "cultural icon" and "national treasure". Between its launch in 1980 and its relaunch in 2011, notwithstanding it having been out of print for a significant portion of the intervening period, the recipe book sold more than a million copies – earning its description as a "publishing phenomenon".
During the 1970s and 80s, The Australian Women's Weekly was among the highest-selling magazines in Australia and published a wide range of titles for cake decorating, recipe and meal ideas in both book and magazine form.
Themes and designs
There are 108 themed cakes appearing in the original edition, "largely composed of packet butter cake mix, Vienna cream icing and lollies", although "for the over-achiever", the book offers a recipe for fresh butter cake at the front.
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". The swimming pool cake — a construction filled with jelly and tiny swimming figures — has been referred to as "the crowning glory" because to a parent, it seemed so difficult to engineer. Some of the better-known cakes are:
Choo-choo train (cover image), Originally designed and created by Agnes Lee
Swimming pool, featuring green jelly, typically Aeroplane Jelly Originally designed and created by Susan Christmas Jack in the box Piano Castle, featuring meringue Clock Racetrack, figure-8 shape Robot Lion Good witch Farmyard Miss Muffet Cricket bat Cricket field Dolly Varden Miss Piggy
Humpty dumpty
Duck, featuring chips
Pirate
Rubber ducky Originally designed and created by Agnes Lee featuring popcorn
Shark
Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe
Echidna
Koala
Giraffe
Ghost
Gingerbread house
Hopscotch
Pink elephant
Typewriter
Butterfly
Publication history
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.
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. The first edition was printed in 1980, and a "vintage" edition of the book was published in 2011 — being reprinted four times in the first six months with initial sales of 100,000 copies. As of 2015, the 2011 edition is in the circulating collection of over 40 public libraries across the country while the original edition (in various reprints) remains in circulation in 27. Four of the original recipes featuring cartoon characters were removed from the 2011 edition due to the publisher no longer having a license. First editions can sell on eBay for 12 times their original price.
Influence
Australian demographer Bernard Salt has suggested that the book modernised and "grandified" children's birthday party culture in Australia. 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, and the publisher's test kitchen had a dedicated, much-used telephone help-line for parents making the cakes to a deadline.