SCARY PARTY ANIMALS
N ot so long ago, there were few options for birthday cake. Homebaked usually involved a sponge, chocolate or vanilla. For little girls, an upturned bowl-shaped sponge with a Barbie stuck in it, iced with a star nozzle into a lavish ball-gown, the iconic “doll cake”. A butterfly was made from a square, sliced into two triangles for wings, liquorice for antennae and finger biscuits for the body.
Boys got soccer fields featuring plastic figurines on grass made of green-dyed desiccated coconut. Shop-bought cakes were waves of butter cream with a plastic ribbon tied around the side.
It started to get exotic with the arrival of ice-cream cakes. Then the face of the birthday child was printed on a cake in barely edible icing (which bit do you slash first — eye, nose?). Today, cakes are a fondant fest with hand-sculpted fairies, flowers of horticultural precision, butterflies flying on invisible wire, ombreshaded icing piped in roses, Avengers and Ben 10 made of modelling chocolate.
Inside, who can guess. Vanilla sponge is unlikely to hold up all that fondant, nor pique interest. Expect blue velvet, rainbow — seven layers with oodles of luminous gel colouring, or trifle cake — biscuit base, layers of cake, jelly and cream. A “surprise” cake spews Smarties when you cut it.
Parties have followed suit. A UK study found that the average middle-class parent spends around R5 000 on a child’s party, every year. Average does not mean Prince George and the Kardashian kid. An SA party planner’s website offers a “special” of R3 500, which gets you a mobile fridge machine that produces ice cream, snow cones, candy floss and slushies. Foam machines, fro-yo dispensers, fun fair-style mechanical rides, miniature trains and petting zoos are not uncommon. Stilt walkers, make-up artists, a magic show, karaoke, massage therapists or pampering for kids and adults, go-karts, adult climbing wall, appearances by Barney and Winnie the Pooh . . . it is enough to make one want to lie down with a moist towel across the brow.
One Joburg mom says, “We’ve gone back to the ’80s. Five kids, one gift and a cake, that’s it.” Rewind for a moment, to those days when cameras used film so you had a few group photos, mostly out of focus with that odd cousin picking his nose, rather than a Dropbox of professional shots of the birthday girl staring poignantly at the fondant, bespoke cake.
Colourful cooldrinks and bunting for decorations, Boudoir biscuit boats and racing cars, jellies in orange skins and icecream cone clowns were side items. The birthday girl or boy was identified by the chichiest party hat. Parents dropped children off, they played ring-a-roses, wrote-a-letter-to-my-friend and musical chairs, pass the parcel. Before sunset, parents fetched their exhausted children, and it was over.
No deflated jumping castle, tortured rabbits, lambs and goats left behind to cause a neighbourhood health hazard. And there were no party packs to extend the sugar rush after the fact.
You can’t win if you keep it simple, either. Minimalist, healthy parties are loathed. “We got a few baby tomatoes, hummus and carrot sticks,” one mom ranted. “Poor kids had to nibble fruit and low-fat everything while staring at a sh*texpensive, GIGANTIC, colourful cake which they didn’t cut up. Seriously?”
Another said: “We were invited to a fourth-birthday party at a park. We were given a picnic basket of grapes, a bag of chips and juice. No cupcakes or sweets for the kids. Just bananas, naartjies and apples. We left early.”