Someone Tracked Down The Author Behind The Women’s Weekly Cake Book & She’s Got Some TEA

Our obsession with nostalgia has influenced everything from film to fashion and now it’s even impacting the baking industry.

Those iconic cakes from Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbook that you once begged your parents to bake for you have made a very welcome resurgence lately.

The good people at FEMAIL tracked down the OG designer of the cakes, Pamela Clark, who once worked as the chief home economist at the Women’s Weekly test kitchen from 1969, planning meals that were then photographed for the magazine.

Good old Pam spilled some behind-the-scenes tea RE: the printing of the vintage cookbooks that your mum or nan probably still own under a stack of paperwork somewhere.

“There was talk of doing a children’s birthday book but people didn’t think it would go well but I was in there fighting for it because I was interested in making the cakes,” Pamela told the publication.

“We worked on them for a couple of years in between the other cookbooks,” she added. “Sometimes we would be midway through when the food editor would say it looked ‘fantastic’ and needed to be shot that moment.”

“Gradually it took off. It’s a bit of an honour really. Who would have thought this daggy cookbook would became an Aussie icon,” she said.

She then discussed her favourite cakes to make, which include the Dolly cake with a marshmallow skirt and the swimming pool cake with musk stick ladder rungs.

See below:

And the one she refuses to make? That’s the tip truck cake, which she described as a “shocker”.

“It’s defying gravity with the tip part… it’s cake for goodness sake it can’t hold up everything,” she said.

If you think you’ve got what it takes to defy gravity, rush out and buy a copy of the recently resurfaced AWW Children’s Birthday Cake Book.

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