Learning Day: Party Cakes For All Occasions

If you're a person with the niche interests of baking and terrifying things, you've probably already heard of the legendary 1990s Australian Women's Weekly Magazine's Party Cakes For All Occasions. It's just a normal magazine full of cakes that are not actually for all occasions; they're mostly for children's birthday parties, except that they are the kind of cakes that will cause children to flee the birthday party.

People have asked a lot of great questions about the cover of this book like, why is the clown dead? The answer to this, I assume, is because the editor of this cake book for children is Pyramid Head or some other absolute monster who has never seen or had any close contact with a child or a cake before in their entire life. Imagine a fun-shaped cake for a '90s kid. Quick, did you immediately think of Tangles?

Oh, I'm sorry, is Tangles unsettling you? Imagine if he was the cake at your birthday party in 1994! Look at his little horse that clearly has a secret. Is that secret that he ate Tangles hands? Is that why Tangles has no hands, and there are mysterious red splotches all over the Tangle horse. I can't stress how much this cake book was made in 1994 and not 1907. What child was asking for a marionette cake in the era of our lord and savior, Tony Hawk? I know that Tangles is attached to a marionette control bar, but it does look like he's raising his hand in violence against me personally.

Sometimes spooky ones sneak in there, right? That's probably what you're thinking. Maybe there's a pale little Victorian orphan child who longs to see Tangles at her birthday party, and we have to do at least one for her. Let's see some more cakes! They can't all be that spooky. This guy is called Silly Scarecrow.

"A visage of a man made specifically to frighten animals and children. This is what the child will want at its celebration of birth," said Pyramid Head. The Silly Scarecrow's hair and arm stuffing is made out of "cheese-flavored twisties," which I eventually learned is an Australian brand and not a way of avoiding saying Cheetos. This book apparently has some concerns about copyright, but not a lot because you here's Marvel's The Amazing Spider-man.

He's not Guy Who Like Spider or Sidney Spider Freak; he's "The Amazing Spider-Man," and he's the only official copyrighted character in the whole book. I would love to know the story behind this. Was Spider-Man that cheap to license, or did the editor of the cake book blow the budget on Spider-Man and could only afford nightmares like Tangles or above for the rest of the book? Either way, there's definitely a story of how Spider-man ended up here, and I'm dying to know it because there are other cakes that are soft knockoffs of other copyrighted works but not Marvel's The Amazing Spider-Man. He's right here between the spooky Scarecrow and the deceased clown.

I'd like to also take this opportunity to mention that the "recipes" for creating these cakes suck shit. Let's look closer at the full recipe for The Amazing Spider-Man cake.

It has one picture and calls for a "quantity" of frosting. That could be any amount of frosting. I Googled to see if maybe quantity is a fun Australian expression for a specific amount of something, but no, it means the exact same thing it means in America, which is the numerical equivalent of a shrug. Essentially, this recipe has two steps:

1. Bake round cake

2. Spider-Man that shit

I guess I'm fine with how terrible the recipes are because I'm not out here rooting for any of these cakes to come into existence. They can't even do a simple disembodied head of a pony cake without putting madness in the pony's eyes. These cakes should stay firmly in the pages of the book.

In fact, normal eyes are a huge problem in the world of cakes. It's really hard not to make nightmare eyes. They all just come out like that. Maybe frosting naturally makes nightmare shapes, or at least, it does for this cake book. They're not all the same kind of nightmare eyes either. This Snowman looks like he's aware of his existence and that you're about to eat him, but he's trying to pretend it's not happening.

This koala's gaze is too intense. I hate the energy that he's bringing to this cake. It's making me uncomfortable, and I'm an adult woman; I could defeat this cake in battle easily; how would a child feel seeing this at their birthday party?

It's not just the eyes that are crazy, though. They didn't have to give Dannie Dinosaur such menacing little teeth, but they did it anyway. Again, whoever made this cake was uncertain what normal, not terrifying, cake anatomy looks like. They were raised in the nightmare zone and came to our dimension to make frightening confectionaries.

Speaking of cake teeth, blah!

It's not all bad; there's one thing I respect about this insane cake book, which is that they do throw in some cakes for people who have no cake-baking experience. Cakes are sort of like balloon animals or clouds in that they can sort of be anything if you squint hard enough, but if you don't want to take on the responsibility of sculpting the frenzy into the koala's eyes, you can try something like the Snow Skis cake.

It's a cake cut down into two long, skinny cakes. I know the title of the book is Party Cakes For All Occasions but what occasion is this for exactly? Is some child named Bentley Smyth Pippens the Third having a Swiss Alps-themed birthday gala? This is clearly the loser cake, but I'm glad they have it. If you fuck up the madness, Koala, just cut him into two long skinny lines, and guess what? He's skis now. You're welcome.

Or cut him into five squares and he's Gorgeous Gorilla.

You're very welcome.

However, if you're going to make a cake book for people who aren't good at baking or being able to identify danger when it's clearly present, you probably shouldn't advise them to put inedible things on their cakes. We've all seen a child accidentally hork down a frosting covered birthday candle, right? It happens. They poop it out, and/or it stays inside them forever, and it doesn't matter because we're all forty percent microplastics now anyway. Some of these cakes don't just have harmless and tasty birthday candles for you to eat, though. This one has eggshells for eyeballs.

Then, of course, there's the king of all cakes, the reason I bought this book, Joe Bad. It's a cake with real safety pins, spikes, and even a piercing in it. This is not advisable. Also, again, I have to ask who is this cake for? What child is having a generic punk man themed birthday party?

Most cake decorating books will have a little description of the cake and who might enjoy it but not this book, and to an extent I respect that. Who is this generic punk man cake full of dangerous inedible obstacles for? Don't ask. Just grab some black licorice, safety pins, and a quantity of icing, and get to work.

This cake book ends up being more than just psychologically dangerous to children. It might actually be physically dangerous. The mental scars of attending a Tangles birthday party may never heal, but swallowing a punk rock collar spike is also an event that changes you. I bet Australian nineties kids grew up to be really resilient.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Rebrandrew, who eats safety pins all the time and doesn't see what the big deal is.

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