In 1980, The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book forever changed the way kids celebrate their special day. This is our celebration of its history and iconic creations.
The creation of the Rubber Ducky cake
It had been a long slog. For two years, when things weren’t too chaotic pulling the regular recipes together, Ellen Sinclair, The Weekly’s renowned Food Director, would instruct her team to put aside a baking day. It was then that the creative minds of the Test Kitchen came out to play, as they whipped up new and innovative cake formations for the debut of The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book – a title they hoped would prove as popular as previous releases, including the Chinese Cooking Class Cookbook and Best Ever Recipes.
“Those went off like a rocket,” recalls Pamela Clark, then Chief Home Economist, whose idea it had initially been to make their 1980 offering a party cake extravaganza. Mrs S, as Ellen’s team called her, gathered the troops around. “Girls,” she said, “we are at the end of the book. We only need one more cake and we’re finished. Go home and think about it.”
The following day, they reunited in the kitchen to share their thoughts. Overnight, however, Mrs S had been struck by inspiration during her grandson’s bathtime. Pulling a rubber ducky out of her handbag, she said, “This is the last cake. A rubber ducky will be good. But I want something three-dimensional, not a cut-out of a duck.”
A feat of engineering
All eyes immediately swivelled towards Agnes Lee, the Hong Kong-born former schoolteacher, who they called “Engineer Agnes” due to her ability to devise construction plans for the trickiest creations which to date had included the Rocket and the Gingerbread House.
“It didn’t faze me,” Agnes, now 80, tells The Weekly of how she would come to make history. “It isn’t difficult to come up with the cutting of the cake and how you use it. The basic rule is don’t waste any cake, try to use every piece of it. But the thing that worried me was, how could I show the beak? I can’t use cake; it will be too heavy.”
Having constructed the shape of the duck and whipped up the icing, Agnes figured taking her lunch break outdoors in the fresh air might help her come up with a solution. As she strolled down Park Street in Sydney’s CBD – the same place the Test Kitchen remains to this day – Agnes passed a milk bar where she had a stroke of inspiration.
“They’d tied up packets of chips to dangle as advertising,” she says “And I went, ‘yep, that can be it!’ So I bought a couple of packets and went back up and finished the cake off.”
The Women’s Weekly Duck Cake’s starring role in Bluey
Today, Rubber Ducky is arguably the most recognisable birthday cake of all time, having starred in an episode of Bluey and with people all over the world having tried their hand at the iconic creation.
Although, adds Agnes, if you look closely, you’ll notice that her cake wasn’t perfect. It had sat on the bench for close to a week before being captured in a photo shoot, so the team thought they were done with the original Ducky. Agnes tipped it into the bin and went back to her regular business.
But then the photographer came rushing out – they needed to reshoot, he told her. The powers that be weren’t happy with the angle he had used.
“I said, ‘Oh no, I’m going to have to make it again’,” she recalls. “And then I went, ‘No, bugger it. I’m going to dig it out of the bin’. There wasn’t anything else in it, so it wasn’t dirty. But if you look closely, the icing had set and there’s a crack where the three orange Smartie buttons are. It sticks out like a sore thumb every time I look at that first edition.”
“The naivety of those cakes, I think, is what basically sells this book.”
The charm of the cakes, however, has always been that they’re not picture perfect. Look closely and you can see uneven icing, misplaced lollies or slightly crooked cuts.
“When all of us made these cakes for the book,” explains Pamela, who would take over from Mrs S as Food Director in 1983, “they were prototypes. We’d put them straight down on the bench and say, ‘Here’s an idea, what do you think?’ And if Mrs S liked it, she said, ‘Let’s shoot it, little darling.’
“What you see is just how they turned out. And the naivety of those cakes, I think, is what basically sells this book.”
1970s: the new trend of child-friendly cakes
In 1980, the idea of having a special cake for a children’s birthday party was, says food historian Lauren Samuelsson, still a relatively new phenomenon. “Birthday cakes aren’t actually as old as we would think,” she explains. “It was only in the 20th century that we started to see birthday cakes. And up until the 1960s, a birthday cake would usually be a fruitcake. They were seen as a celebration cake because they were pretty expensive to make – they used a lot of ingredients, dried fruit and all that sort of stuff.
“Even as an adult, fruitcake isn’t my favourite. It wasn’t until we were coming into the 1970s that we started to see more child-friendly cakes.”
Creating memories, not perfection
In The Weekly, cake recipes and decorating tips had mostly been aimed at creating wedding cakes, entries for The Royal Easter Show or other special occasions. The brightly coloured and lavishly decorated cakes that came out of the Test Kitchen in this period truly broke the mould.
They also tapped into the fact that, by the time the 1980s rolled around, many more women were in the workforce and increasingly time-poor. Encouraging bakers to use packet mix and store-bought lollies helped cut down on time spent in the kitchen, with more time to enjoy the results. “They didn’t necessarily have that much time to be baking cakes from scratch,” Lauren says, “but they still wanted to do something special for their kid.
To be given permission to use something like a cake mix, but then also break things down into really clear step-by-steps, gave parents a confidence that they could do it.”
The infamous Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book Tip Truck
Not that all of them were as easy as they seemed on paper. Today Pamela warns parents to “glue the bloody pages together” when it comes to requests for the Tip Truck. She’d originally been asked to come up with it by Mrs S for her grandson Jeremy’s birthday and it proved a feat of engineering she worried may get the best of her.
“I hated that Tip Truck with a passion,” she laughs. “I hated the colour. It was held together with skewers. It’s a monster of a cake.”
Women’s Weekly birthday cakes: finding inspiration everywhere
When Pamela and the team started creating the Children’s Birthday Cake Book, there was no set plan for how many cakes there would be, nor for what form they would all take. Inspiration came from all kinds of places. The Dressing Table cake, for instance, was a replica of the one that sat in Pamela’s own bedroom.
“I did it with a little cutesy-pie gingham flounce around it and I remember what a nuisance it was because the buttercream got into the gingham and would make it look really strange,” she recalls. “We shot it quickly before the buttercream got into it.”
For Agnes, it was being caught out by industrial action one morning that led her to create the iconic Choo-Choo Train that graced the cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book.
“I was going to work and I only knew it was a train strike when I got to the station,” she says. “Then the country train came along with all the coal and everything in it. The carriages are different, they’re not like normal trains. I took a look and went, I can make a train without the people and the seats.”
From the train track to the swimming pool cake
Creative ideas flowed out of the team – from sporting fields to animals, fairytale creatures and everything in between. They also made Disney, Muppet and Hanna-Barbera characters – although these were later scrapped due to copyright infringements.
“You would talk to anyone you could lay your hands on,” says Pamela of the quest to come up with so many innovative ideas for new cakes. “The Smiley Shark came about because a little boy across the road desperately wanted a shark cake for his birthday, so I made it for him. We used to brainstorm a lot. And we’d look at kids’ colouring books, things like that. Back in the ’70s, it wasn’t like we had the internet!”
Their own children also proved helpful. “I woke up one morning when there was a cake day and I didn’t know what I was doing,” Agnes recalls. “My daughter had a cut-out of a witch on the dining table for Halloween. And when I saw that, I went, ‘That’s my cake for the day!’ and that’s how we got The Good Witch.”
The chapter of numbers came to pass as they raced to fill final pages for the book. And once the Rubber Ducky was made, the book was sent to the printers.
The Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book is born
Pamela was waiting with bated breath to see if sales of The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book would match the impressive numbers of previous cookbooks invented in the Test Kitchen. She’d had to rally hard to get her bosses across the line in the first place and was having a crisis of confidence. “No one had much faith in the book,” she says of management’s mood. “They had sort of reluctantly agreed to do it.”
Sadly for Pamela, it wasn’t great news.
“It did not sell,” she says of the underwhelming reception to a book that has since gone on to shift well over a million copies around the globe, constantly reprinting due to demand to this day. “It sold well in the UK, Canada and South Africa. But in Australia it was a bit of a dog, really.”
There were probably a few things stacked against early success, reasons Lauren. “Firstly, The Weekly had been putting out a lot of these cake recipes in the magazine to begin with,” she explains. “So if people had cut out those and kept them, why would you buy the book? Also, you’d probably only be purchasing a book if you were throwing your kid a birthday party and they were particularly interested in a certain thing.”
“The cake book with the train on the front”
Although Pamela’s hopes of success for her passion project had dipped, the tide gradually started to turn. Slowly but surely, sales figures went up. And the buzz in the schoolyard surely helped. Kids around the nation would ask for “the cake book with the train on the front” when they were preparing for their next birthday, devouring the pages eagerly as they chose which cake they most desired for their party – and the badgering of their parents began.
“When I was a kid, in the late ’80s coming into the ’90s, I remember flipping through that book,” recalls Lauren, who recently penned A Matter Of Taste: The Australian Women’s Weekly and Its Influence on Australian Food Culture. “If you really liked cats, you might choose the Puss In Boots cake. If you really liked ballet, you might choose the one with the little dancers on it.”
“You could choose something that was a reflection of you. There was so much fun stuff going on – there were lollies and it was brightly coloured, which made it exciting. And it felt special because apart from birthday cakes, in our house, Mum wasn’t decorating cakes like that.”
’80s and ’90s nostalgia
Copies were passed down as children aged up. Generations of kids who had been delighted with their own birthday cakes began making them for their own children.
“There are all these really fun, exciting memories of your birthday being really special, and then that gets linked back to the book,” Lauren says of how it’s seeing continuing success, 45 years after the first copy hit shelves.
“It’s nostalgic. It’s a gift that you give – I recently bought one for my sister-in-law, keeping the generational links alive. When I was doing the research for my book, talking to people about their memories of using The Weekly’s cookbooks, more than 80 per cent would have a really joyous memory of the birthday cake cookbook. And that makes it a standout. You might remember a lovely meal, but to link it to an actual book? This is above and beyond in terms of nostalgia.”
