Why making birthday cakes takes the biscuit

ICAN’T WAIT to see my cake this year,” my daughter exclaimed, a couple of weeks before her eighth birthday. “I bet it’s going to be Oh great. So no pressure there then, I thought. When my children were very little, I didn’t attempt to make fancy novelty birthday cakes. I have minimal artistic ability. I felt that a round chocolate cake with a ton of Smarties on the top was going to make my children perfectly satisfied — which indeed it did.

But then I made a fatal error. When my daughter was turning four, she asked me if I could make her a castle cake. Well, how hard could it be? You just make a square cake, and stick some upside-down ice cream cones on it, right? So I decided to give it a go.

There followed a good eight hours of swearing, multiple muttered diatribes against the whole world of sugarcraft, and feelings of bitter regret about my naïve agreement to take on the challenge — or indeed to have children in the first place, who were going to end up asking for sodding castle birthday cakes.

The resulting creation was extremely lopsided, with turrets that threatened to collapse if anyone breathed too heavily in the same room. But it did have a certain charm, and my daughter loved it.

What I didn’t realise (idiot that I am) was the treadmill that I had stepped on. Because, of course, when the next child’s birthday came up, how could I refuse to make him a fancy cake, too? And then the third one.

By which time, it turned out that the first one was already planning what she’d like me to make for her birthday…

But in fact, as time passed and I became a bit more competent, I started to enjoy myself. That ready-roll icing is just marvellously easy to use — it’s like Play-Doh. With only a tiny amount of skill (luckily for me), you can produce properly impressive results.

One year, I made a princess cake — one of those ones in the shape of half a sphere with a doll’s head and torso stuck into it, so that the cake looks like the doll’s dress. One way of doing this is to buy a cheap doll and hack its legs off.

But I discovered that you can actually get, for a similar price, special dolls designed for the purpose.

Their body is just a spike, which makes them look as though Sid from has been experimenting on them.

When the cake is cut and all is revealed, there is a risk of the more delicate party guests being permanently traumatised.

It turns out that making your child a fancy birthday cake is virtually compulsory for a Jewish parent, so it’s lucky that I saw the error of my ways before being permanently cast out from our people.

What’s more, there are several associated benefits.

Making these complicated cakes has everything to do with showing what an engaged and wholesome mother you are and how much you love your child.

It has whatsoever to do with it being fun to play with icing and hundreds and thousands .

For extra points, it’s important to stay up late into the night perfecting your creation, to prove the level of your devotion.

You can post a picture of your cake on social media, allowing your friends and family to say suitable things about how impressed they are. It doesn’t matter whether they really impressed or not — this is the joy of social media.

It allows you to do something creative in a way that isn’t normally acceptable as an adult. It’s the equivalent of drawing a picture and saying: “‘Look! Look what I’ve made,” and everyone saying, “Wow! Aren’t you clever!”

Normally, the very act of producing something artistic as an adult carries with it an unspoken implication that you yourself think you’re pretty good at it.

But not so with your children’s birthday cakes. They are produced out of love, and therefore people will admire them if they look good and forgive them if they look awful.

And, best of all, this entirely self-serving exercise has the advantage that your child will be properly and utterly thrilled with the result.

So, this year, with the weight of my daughter’s expectations on my shoulders, I sat down with a template, some blocks of pink and purple icing, and pots of silver balls, jelly diamonds and pink and white stars.

The result was a pretty passable butterfly. My daughter certainly thought so, anyway.

And the fact that I got to sit around and play with pretty shiny things for a few hours was an entirely incidental benefit.

My castle cake was lopsided but charming