The Children's Birthday Cake Book, released in 1980, was an essential ingredient of so many childhood birthday parties. ABC series Throwback caught up with its author Pamela Clark about how the "daggy" classic book changed the shape of Australian birthdays.

I've written hundreds and hundreds of cookbooks for the Women's Weekly: there is a team of people who put these books together, but someone has to be an author and take the credit for it, and that's me. It's got to be over 400 now.

The Children's Birthday Cake Book has definitely made birthdays more special for kids of two or three generations.

I remember my own birthdays weren't that special. My mother didn't make us cakes for our birthdays.

I think this book has put birthdays on the map for kids. They take the books to bed with them. It becomes their bedtime reading.

They agonise to the nth degree about which cake they're going to inflict on their poor parents.

Pamela says the book wasn't born in one flashy moment. ( ABC News: Dave May )

The birth of the birthday cake book, it didn't come about in one flashy moment.

We racked our brains and tried to think of just about everything that a child would have been interested in.

In fact, in that book there are 106. We wouldn't do that number of cakes in any kid's cake book now.

We broke a lot of rules making those cakes. We used packet mixes so that there was consistency when we cut the cakes out into various shapes.

We used a basic buttercream, or Vienna cream, they're the same thing, as the frosting for the cakes, coupled with fluffy frosting.

That's an egg white and sugar-type frosting. But basically, no piping or anything complicated. Just very, very simple.

We had a boys section and a girls section.

Now we're talking 1980 here.

The phone did not stop ringing in the test kitchen with people saying, "How dare you segregate boys and girls? How sexist of you".

And that was back in the '80s.

'Glue those pages together and never look back'

Pamela says the Dolly Varden cake "is so mindbogglingly simple". ( ABC News: Dave May )

One of my favourites is the Dolly Varden cake, because it is so mindbogglingly simple.

I'd love to know how many times that Dolly Varden cake with the pink and white marshmallows has been made in this country. It must be gazillions.

I did a goth doll for when one of my granddaughters turned 13, and I went haywire.

She had tattoos, she had piercings, she had pink hair, and all standing out on end, and she really looked outrageous, but great.

The animals were always particularly popular. There's the tiger, and the lion, and the koala, elephants, mice, turtles, a whole range of things.

The animals were always pretty popular. ( ABC News: Dave May )

We never could quite succeed with a kangaroo. They ended up looking peculiar.

If you're picking up this book for the very first time, turn to the tip truck and glue those pages together, and never look back. It's not an easy cake to make. Trust me. I know.

It was almost a feat of engineering, because you had that tip thing happening, and I wasn't good with that sort of thing.

Pamela says she would swear a lot whenever she made the tip truck cake. ( ABC News: Dave May )

It's hard because you have to support the tray, which is on an angle — I had all sorts of skewers and things.

There was a lot of swearing going on when I made that cake, let me tell you.

One of the most important cakes for the book, of course, is the train cake, and that book is often referred to as the book with the train on the cover.

The train is a labour of love, let me tell you. I've made it several times, and Agnes did the original cake for the cover, and she did a mighty job, and it's just become an iconic cake in Australia.

The train cake is a labour of love. ( ABC News: Dave May )

I remember when I made the ghost cake. I was struggling with what to do for his so-called eyes, and suddenly thought, "What about egg shells? They're going to go in the bin, anyway, because I'd made the fluffy frosting using the egg whites".

And stuck the egg shells into the cake, into the frosting, and then just put some smarties in the egg shells, and they look quite ghostly, I thought.

Record of nostalgia through generations

Kids don't care about the details of the cake or how messy it might look, Pamela says. ( ABC News: Dave May )

I think the success behind this book is the dagginess of the cakes.

They look rough and ready, they were rough and ready, and they're not scary at all, and I think most people, even if they've never made a cake before, will give those cakes a go.

Kids are daggy, let's face it, and they like something that's approachable.

They want to wolf those lollies down as fast as they can.

The kids don't care about the details of the cake, how messy it might look, the fact that the icing doesn't go right down to the board. They don't care.

They realise that this cake has been made with love for them.

Kids are daggy and like something that's approachable, Pamela says. ( ABC News: Dave May )

I often think about this book being handed down through generations, and how a single book has actually become a record of kid's birthdays from, say, grandmothers, mothers, daughters, children.

It's an amazing feeling that I get when I allow myself to think about this for a moment or two.

But it's such a record of nostalgia through the years, and through the generations.

'This book has developed a life of its own'

Pamela Clark says her book has "made birthdays more special for kids of two or three generations". ( ABC News: Dave May )

That book has had an amazing impact on the Australian public.

There's a comedian in Victoria who's worked his whole routine around the Children's Birthday Cake Book, and sings about the train on the cover. Oh, and it's very funny.

There's been jewellery made of some of the cakes in the book. There've been events around the book.

I helped with a charity event in Canberra a few years ago, and the aim was to make every cake in the book by 106 different people, and it was staggering.

I've had people bring me their very old books with pages stuck together with buttercream, and want me to sign them, or write something, and they just love those books.

And often, it's the book that their mother made cakes from, and they've passed it on to their daughter, and then their children are now looking at these cakes.

So that's three generations that I've seen and talked to, and they just love that book.

It feels like this book has developed a life of its own, and it will be around for a long time yet with even more generations of people making the cakes for their kids.