Australian birthday cake.

My Niece Olivia turned seven. Her mum, my sister Helen made this beautiful cake for her party.How lucky Olivia is.

My sisters are good in making cakes, See Grace's

In fact we all inheritted Mum's genes. Mum loved making cakes. In the early 60s when I was a little kid, Mum learned from her British friends how to make rich butter cakes and iced them with royal icing. We had beautiful birthday cakes.

My fondiest memory was the day I ruined my Grandpa's birthday cake. We all had helped Mum beat the cake mixture with a big spiral hand held beater in a big bucket. In those days, she didn't have an electric mixer. The cake must have been fifteen inches in diameter because we had a lot of relatives. By the time, Mum had mixed all the icing, it was my bed time. She chased me to bed.

I woke up early before anyone was awake. In those days, because of the ants and humidity of Borneo, the food pantry were not attached to the wall. They were flimsy and had legs with a water moat and wire netting doors. I must have been 6 or 7 years old. I wanted to have a sneak peek of the cake.

I must have climbed up the lower level of the pantry to see the cake kept on the upper level. The cake fell to the floor, and the royal icing cracked to pieces. Mum and Dad heard the crash, and they came to see what the commotion was.

What happened next, I couldn't remember. Mum didn't say a word. I knew I was in big trouble. But nobody said anything, by then my siblings had woken up. They were probably using their body langauge telling me that I was in BIG trouble. Mum was too busy patching the cake.

To this day, we still marvel how Mum patched up the broken cake. At Grandpa's house, in front of more than fifty relatives, Mum was beaming with pride when she brought out the cake. The relatives oooh aaaah at Mum's European cake. You see, Mum was the first member of the big extended family to make Eurporean cakes.

The best thing was I was never punished.