Mum made a pirate-ship cake, a Grover-from-Sesame-Street cake, a dolls house cake (Ibsen’s A Dolls House, examining the tragic disintegration of a Norwegian middle-class marriage with fondant and marshmallows. Mum felt my six-year-old sister was ready for an education in 19th century Scandinavian theatrical naturalism).

This went on for years until us Katzy kids got too old for birthday parties, lost interest in birthday cakes, and also mum became a coeliac so she was just baking garbanzo flour cakes, topped with a delicious icing of cornstarch.

The Themed Kiddies Birthday Cake-Decorating Tradition was over ... until I had kids of my own, and my wife and I started the whole thing up again, but with a highly unnecessary, ruthlessly competitive streak.

We went hard: royal icing hard. We made our kids a Pikachu cake, a Miffy cake, a Dorothy the Dinosaur cake, infringing countless international copyrights (and I can only talk about it now because the six-year statute of limitations has elapsed. Stuff you, Wiggles lawyers!).

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We made a photo-realistic cheeseburger cake with flattened spearmint-leaves-pickles that everybody picked off. There was a Little Mermaid cake with Ariel wearing a tiny Caramel Buds bikini-top, and a black Batman-symbol cake that had a cake-to-licorice ratio of 1:100, causing a three-day licorice-induced fluoro-green defecation-outbreak among partygoers.

The kids got older, we went harder: decorative silver sugar-pearls harder. Birthday cakes marked out milestones: an iPhone cake when my daughter got her first iPhone. An L-plate cake when my son got his learners. A clapperboard cake when my daughter got into film school, followed by an espresso-machine barista-worker cake when she got out of film school.

But this year … our cake-making enthusiasm and energy finally collapsed like an over-leavened curdled-cream sponge. It was my daughter’s birthday last week: she lives on the other side of town so we had a Zoom birthday party and presented her with a fake pottery cake she’d once made for a primary school arts and crafts project.

I found it in a memorabilia box: a dusty brown clay slab with polka-dot smarties painted on top. We wiped it down, melted a candle onto it, sang Happy Birthday, then my daughter pretended to blow out the candle but it was actually me, blowing from off-screen.

It was a birthday cake for our times. Heavy. Inedible. A little sad. With a hole in the bottom to stop it cracking under pressure.

Danny Katz is a Melbourne humourist.

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