I grew up in an honest, no-nonsense family. A family that taught me the value of a dollar, the merit of a hard day’s work, and to sniff out bullshit from a mile away. We were a humble family. A normal family. And as far as the timeless Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book was concerned, we were a Train Cake family.
You can tell a lot about a person by what cake from the book they got growing up. Train Cake kids are doers, willing to have a crack at just about anything, results be damned. Echidna kids, naturally, are conservers, protecting those who can’t protect themselves. Chip-beak Duck Cake kids were straight-up weird little psychos.
Jelly Pool Cake kids, however? Toffs. Assholes. Insufferable pricks.
Everyone wanted the Jelly Pool Cake, but the entire point of it being in the book was to teach kids that lusting for riches results in ruin. All that glitters may be gold, but nothing gold can ever stay.
But some kids got it. They got the Jelly Pool Cake. And those kids were universally wretched little shitbags who grew up to be even bigger wretched little shitbags.
Successfully badgering Mum into giving you the Jelly Pool Cake proved two things about a person: Your family had enough money to pay someone to make the cake for you, and you loved shoving that fact into people’s faces.
The Jelly Pool Cake, for starters, flaunts its gaudy splendour by having jelly on it. That’s two desserts in one dish. Cake by itself is good enough. What decadent deadshit looks at a cake and demands a subsequent dessert atop it? It is lunacy.
Then there’s the cake decorations: Lounging pig people lording it up in lime green luxury while god knows what lurks beneath. You see all those chocolate fingers surrounding the cake? Those are unpaid servants, all holding the cake up so it won’t fall over, doing the actual hard work so the rich idiots floating in their own gelatinous filth can laugh it up.
The Jelly Pool Cake is a disgusting exhibit of classist bullshit, and it absolutely shows in the kids whose birthdays were celebrated with it.
