What is it about birthday cakes? I don't know quite when it all started to go wrong. I have pictures of my elder son's first birthday "party" (me, my mum and a pot of tea – in the photographs she is incandescent with grandmotherly pride, while I have the hollow, shell-shocked expression of one blindsided by early motherhood) and his cake is simply that, a birthday cake, like the birthday cakes of my childhood. A plain, round Victoria sponge, thinner than strictly desirable because of my propensity to turn any cake into a communion wafer.
The decoration is nothing fancier than some lumpy white icing, a couple of jelly diamonds and a single candle. In a couple of the pictures my son is holding a slice indifferently in one hand; in later shots, he has picked the jelly diamond off the top and discarded the rest to concentrate on playing with some wrapping paper.
So how is it that eight years later, I am in my kitchen late at night, carefully grinding a blend of red confectioner's sugar, orange Smarties and candied nuts in a pestle and mortar to replicate the texture of the shell of a giant spider crab for that same child's ninth birthday? Somewhere along the line, I have been lured into the cult of the elaborate birthday cake.
First it was the Australian Women's Weekly Birthday Cake book, with its dragons, penguins and football pitches, not to mention its ominous and oft-repeated instruction: "This is not difficult, but it is time-consuming."
Now, not even Women's Weekly will do it for my kids – they make up their own cake concepts. This gave rise to a lengthy and very regrettable detour into Pokémon cakes and has brought me to the crustacean car crash I am in the process of engineering. It's cake hyperinflation, a cake arms race and goodness knows where it will end. This year my younger son handed me a detailed sketch of his desired birthday cake theme, while his brother placed his order with the breezy insouciance of one accustomed to getting his own way in such matters.
"I want a giant spider crab, and a spinal column, on the same cake. Or two separate ones if it's easier," he added magnanimously. Then he went back to eating his toast.
Clearly the sane response to a demand like this is not to start wondering how to render gill fronds accurately with strawberry bootlaces, but nevertheless, that is what happened.
"Crabzilla" is not going well. In a masterstroke of inspiration I have decided that I can make the front claws from candy vampire teeth, but the back legs have me stumped. My face and clothes are covered in a fine layer of icing sugar and edible glitter, making me look like I have been at a rave for middle-aged bakers. The repeated "testing" of the icing could topple me into type 2 diabetes any moment. The crab itself looks … odd. It looks nervous, actually, and well it might. The sad truth is I am not even any good at making cakes: I have the fine motor skills and the culinary instincts of a neanderthal. The only reason any of these cakes succeed is fear of disappointing their recipient and brute determination.
Sometimes they go terribly wrong. One year I made a ladybird cake, with what was supposed to be a crisp, chocolate outer shell that you bashed with a hammer, revealing a cache of chocolate coins and sweets. My version looked like the remains of a prehistoric murder victim unearthed on Time Team, one who had suffered a succession of catastrophic skull fractures. My attempt to deflect attention from its deficiencies by sticking sparklers into the crevices was not entirely successful either; the chocolate started to melt, distorting the ladybird's cheery face into something faintly nightmarish. My younger son became quite distressed, and refused to hit it with a hammer. In the end, his father had to put it out of its misery like an injured bird. We don't talk about it.
It has become clear that I'm not alone: all around me, parents who are perfectly sane in other respects are conjuring buttercream masterpieces, creations worthy of Willy Wonka. Curious, I asked friends and acquaintances what their birthday cake Sistine chapel was. "Club Penguin Jiu Jitsu," said one, bafflingly. "A castle with a drawbridge, moat and crenellations." "A seven-layered rainbow cake." "A pirate ship – but it ended up looking more like a float from gay and lesbian mardi gras."
Most famously, Mike Cooper, a creative director created a perfect, playable replica of the Angry Birds game for his son Ben's sixth birthday. The Angry Birds cake wasn't Cooper's first big production cake: it's a tradition that started on Ben's first birthday.
"I hit the supermarket to pick something up. But as I browsed the cake aisle I was confronted by a lineup of boring, impersonal rubber-iced contenders. I thought, I can do better than a melted wax Scooby-Doo lookalike. I went home, got the sketchbook out and got to work. At the time, Ben loved this little red trolley that had helped him learn to walk – he'd stick all his toys in it. What better thing to model my first ever cake on than that?"
The trolley was followed by other masterpieces, including a minutely detailed guitar with strawberry bootlace strings, and a four-foot dinosaur skeleton buried in soil made from Oreo crumbs. Cooper isn't a professional, or even a keen amateur baker: the cake compulsion comes from another place entirely.
"I'm a sucker for the design and construction part of it – conjuring up unusual ideas and trying to find a way to make it work. My wife, Lucy, is the real baker and kindly makes all the construction materials, whether it's chocolate brownie bricks or vanilla plaster. I set myself a golden rule – a cake can never take more than a day to design and create, otherwise it becomes stressful rather than fun."
Not everyone goes as far as Mike, but lots of us pin a great deal of significance on the birthday cake; it's a cornerstone of family ritual. That moment when the lights go off, the candles are lit and the cake – carefully hidden until now from the birthday boy or girl – is carried in, reverently, while we all sing happy birthday, defines childhood birthdays for many of us. Why? Everyone knows that small children just pick the sweets off the top and tread the cake into the carpet. So why do we bother?
"I think it's partly my perfectionist streak coming out," says my neighbour Rebecca, a diplomat, who not only managed to replicate Cooper's Angry Birds cake to my intense admiration, but also made an eerily accurate cake representation of her son's favourite video: a giant octopus eating a shark. "I want my kids and their friends to be impressed, to give them something to remember. And partly, I have so little outlet for that kind of creativity in my day job that I enjoy throwing myself into the process."
Others are carrying on a family tradition. My friend Kate, an accomplished baker, has vivid memories of childhood birthdays: "My mum made us wonderful birthday cakes, and wonderful birthdays. She once made me a gorgeous owl cake with feathers made out of flakes. It was a work of art, not because it was particularly ambitious just because it was perfect". Mike Cooper also had a predisposition to cake creativity: "My mum is Brazilian and her family had a great tradition of celebrating birthdays with hilariously over-the-top cakes. I remember seeing pictures of my big sister's cakes when she was a kid: princess castles as tall as she was. When I came on the scene it was dragons, castles, all sorts. So it's probably in the blood."
The birthday cakes of my childhood were pretty ordinary, but there was a thrill simply from a whole cake being made, decorated, and presented with pomp and ceremony, just for me.
Jodi, of the rainbow layer cake, who has four sons, feels similarly. "I want to show my boys they're worth the effort. There's nothing so indulgent as a cake made specially for you."
Katy, who has three children, and whose blog is a paean to family life, cake and the close relationship between the two, emphasises the ephemeral nature of the birthday cake. "They're such a faff to make and they're so impermanent. I always think about things like cakes or flowers, that it is a sign of deeper love than other, more lasting things because they often end up costing you a fortune or taking lots of time, yet they are so fragile, which makes them intrinsically more valuable to the recipient."
Mike echoes that sentiment: "I relish the fact that a cake, by its nature, is there to be shared, so there's never a preciousness to what I've made – you're crafting something that you know is going to be carved up and scoffed without any fuss or guilt."
What seems to unite us all in our cake-making exploits is a sense that the gesture itself has symbolic importance. When I make a cake, it's a pure, pointless act of love for the child; I want to delight him, make him laugh, show him how very worth it he is.
Mike agrees: "For me, creating a silly, ridiculously over-the-top birthday cake is a pantomime, yet a deeply genuine gesture to show my kids how much I love them. I want them to look back on their childhood and have it punctuated with vivid memories, one of which is remembering how their dad used to make them a bonkers cake every year."
The crab was more or less OK in the end, if you didn't look too closely. "It was amazing," said my son, forgetting himself for a moment. Then he recovered. "But the back legs were rubbish".
Better we don't mention the spinal column.
