Yes. When I was 5 my gandmother made a sheet cake and piped Burt and Erny(sesame street)on it. It was the coolest cake that I have ever recieved.

I got alot of angel food cakes when I was a kid, and chocolate with chocolate frosting. The one that sticks out in my memory the most was one my Mom bought from a friend, it was a pizza cake. Had mushrooms, peperoni, green peppers the whole nine yards. It was the best cake ever!

One I remember my Mom made for my brother was a hamburger cake, all the tomatos and leaves etc were made out of this really sweet icing, was nasty, we could barely eat it, it was soo sweet, lol. It looked good though!

My mom use to make shaped cakes - elephants and rabbits. My favorite was the Barbie doll cakes. That is when my love of cakes started.

The whole reason I took my first Wilton class (which started the obsession) was so I could make my daughters first birthday cake... which I wanted to do because I had such fond memories of my childhood birthday cakes. I though my mom was an amazing cake decorator because every birthday she made a character cake (with the Wilton pans) with the star tip decor... I remember being totally amazed that my own mom could make something so beautiful!!

For my ninth birthday my parents gave me a skating party (soooo cool in 1988!), and my dad made me a cake in the shape of a skate. It was white with hot pink wheels and laces - just like my skates! It was the raddest cake ever!

On the flip side, for my twelfth birthday my whole family forgot and at the last minute gave me a leftover fruit cake from Christmas.
Worst. Birthday. Ever.

what a cool thread....my mom always made me a chocolate heart shaped cake cake decorated with white icing and some kind of pink decoration like flowers or something.....she still makes it for me...not telling my age but probably a little old for it but I love it...it's so special to me

now my grandmother...maybe not big on the decorating but she can really make a home made cake....she always made home made cakes cookies and candy when we were kids....not she still makes the candy every Christmas

Tx- leftover fruit cake..oh that's bad..I'm sorry

I didn't get grocery store cakes either, they were box mixes kept in the pan they were baked in and frosting- from a can. Sometimes I would get those letters from the cake that spelt Happy Birthday.

One birthday I did get a grocery store cake, it was Snow White. I thought I was the luckiest person alive. I kept the toys and still have them to this day!!

I still remember the first time I saw a character cake. I was in the 8th grade and went on a tour of our local Vocational School. They had a bunch of pans hanging, one of which was a frog! I just about died!! I didn't know where to get one or anything about decorating it, but I had to have one of them!! ..an Now I do have it!!

I only remember one cake from childhood: My grandmother also took decorating classes when she was younger, and she made me the standing doll cake with the parasol (like a southern belle). I thought it was so beautiful. I have an old photo of it somewhere...I'll try to scan it and make it my profile picture.

Then for my 21st birthday (I'd had a love for Mickey Mouse for years), one of my co-workers, who had decorating skills as well, made me a Mickey character cake (that I also have a picture of, come to think of it).

I was so amazed at both times that regular people could do that with icing and a cake that I always wanted to do it myself. Of course it took me another 12 years or so to even learn how myself.

Wow - I'm sitting here in tears. I am at work and should be doing something other than playing on my favorite website, but this discussion is just so good!

Memories...wow....I remember a Barbie cake I had one year but I most especially remember the teddy bear (9x13 flat cake sculpted into a bear) for my 6th birthday. My brother was one (1976) and is in the background of a picture of me holding that cake. He's in a stainless steel highchair, by the way. Ha! Oh, and incidentally, my brother and his wife just had their first son this week. Wow, how time flies....Anyway, Mom always ordered our cakes from the same lady, Mrs. Welch, who did them out of her home. Our entire family used her for birthdays, baby showers, weddings, retirement parties - you name the event, Mrs. Welch did the cake! They were always scrumptious and that buttercream icing....ooooh yummmm....Great, great memories!

Mom passed away several years ago but I have carried on the tradition of bringing the cakes to our families events. I will never be the kind of decorator that Mrs. Welch was but I certainly try. Today, I am honored that my family now calls me for every cake needed and I love the looks on their faces when I reveal a cake to them. I love how they love them because I know my brother and sister's are thinking the same thing I am - Mom would have loved this! It's not about me making the cake, it's about that same feeling we all get when the cake arrives to the party. Mom built a tradition of having the most wonderful cakes at every family event and now we're carrying on that tradition. (wiping the tears) She's smiling from Heaven - I just know it!

My mom wasnt to much of a baker! But she did order the heck out of the HEB cakes! That's what we grew up on..not to pretty on the eyes either. I have pictures and the cakes look like poo!

Ok This one has brough me out of hiding!
First time poster- long time lurker!!!
For my 3rd birthday my mom and next door neighbor made me a panda bear cake out of the Wilton stand up bear cake pan.
The black parts were covered with chocolate sprinkles.

I found that pan about 10 years ago and that is what got me in to cake decorating!

Ok This one has brough me out of hiding!
First time poster- long time lurker!!!
For my 3rd birthday my mom and next door neighbor made me a panda bear cake out of the Wilton stand up bear cake pan.
The black parts were covered with chocolate sprinkles.

I found that pan about 10 years ago and that is what got me in to cake decorating!

NOt really a 'cake' cake but, for my 9th birthday my mom asked me what lind of cake I wanted. Keep in mind I am from New Orleans and I don't like to eat cake, I told her that I wanted a beignet cake. So she spent all day making them and piled them all on top of each other in a pyramid shape and topped them with powered sugar. I was in heaven.

PS Beignets are square shaped fried pastry and topped with powered sugar, kinda likea donught with no hole and square.

My favorite birthday cake EVER was the only homemade one I ever got!! I was about 5 or 6 and it was a pink store bought frosting frosted cake in a lasagna pan and my mom took her hand and held it over the cake and outlined it in frosting, and then filled the entire inside of her "hand print" with silver dragees!!! It was AWESOME!!!!!! And you guessed it.....it was ...........a...........MICHAEL JACKSON GLOVE!! I thought it was the coolest cake I'd ever seen in my entire life and I LOVED it!!!! Definitely the best birthday cake I EVER had!! And yes.........it was in the 80's not the 90's before we knew who Michael Jackson REALLY was! lol

Good question! But actually I don't! I can only remember the one that was made for me when I turned 15 yrs old, but before that, nope. They were usually from the local bakery.

My favorite birthday cake I remember is of course there were 2 of them, I was a twin, was a Barbie cake. That would be back in the late 60's. One other cake I remember was an Easter cake that my grandma made us every easter and it was a lamb cake and oh I still remember the sent of the peanut butter icing it always had. The cake texture was so different from the cakes these days too. There were 5 of us kids and we rarely got the enjoyment of cake, so when Easter came we always knew that peanut butter icing covered lamb cake was coming! One year one of my brother's was pretending to be a waiter as he walked it from the car into the house and of course he dropped it! Oh were we mad! lol

Those are my memories of cakes!
Thanks for a cool post!

Chippi in the making!

I'm 25 and my grandmother has made my birthday cake every year. I've had every girly cake you can imagine that Wilton had a pan for! I also had the Wonder Mold Barbie doll cake! My most memorable one, though, has to be my 25th birthday when she made me the castle cake with the Wilton kit! She did an amazing job! My husband laughed that I was getting a kids cake, but I didn't care. All my friends wowed over it and my sister ended up getting one for her birthday 2 months later!

The only cake I remember was for my 18th birthday. It was also the day I got engaged (to the man I am still married to, almost 31 years later!!). My mom bought it at the grocery store and it had that big arrangement of roses on top and that was the piece I wanted. When she cut it she turned around and handed it to Jim!! I was so mad

Jibbies

Every year my mom made us box cakes in a glass 9x13 pyrex pan so you could see the cake through it (she would leave it in the pan)and iced it with canned frosting. I'm a weird one and LOVE canned frosting and would eat the leftover icing out straight of the can!! (Have still been known to do that today) I liked Chocolate cake with white frosting. Then if she was feeling creative she would by the sugar letters from the grocery store on the cardboard back ( at least one would break every time trying to get them off the cardboard!) and/or the tubes of icing and write our names on it. She still does this every year til this day for me and my brother. It wouldn't be a birthday w/o it!

I had the most awesome cakes every year. My mom would make mine for my actually birthday(which were always YUMMY) and for my party we went to Pollyann bakery (still is my favorite bakery EVER) and whatever I was into is what my cake was. My favorites wer my Rainbow Bright cake with Lucky on it, my Smurf and Smurfette cake and my He-man(master of the universe) and She-ra (princess of power) cake! We always had my party at this park/beach in Long Beach and it was sooooo much fun . I really miss being a kid!


I loved my snorks cake too

I think that's why I started baking cakes for my kids was because I remember all the ones my mom made me. I remember the holly hobby, the barbie doll, a carousel, and some of my brother's cakes like a semi-truck , race car, and trains. when my oldest son ( now 14 ) turned 5 I looked everywhere for someone to make a 3-D race car cake, but had no luck. so, my husband carved it and my mom star-tipped it and I have been making my kids' cakes from there on.

My mom made everybody a home-baked, icing-from-scratch cake for their birthday. They were almost always angel food with 7-minute icing. Sometimes they were decorated and sometimes they just said "Happy birthday, _______! I especially remember two of mine: a caroussel cake with a peppermint-stick center pole attached to animal cracker horses with different-colored ribbons. The other one was one I requested for my 13th birthday, since there was a party involved, for the first time. I was having a sock hop (if you don't know what this is, please don't be so rude as to ask, since they were popular a long time ago) and my mom made the standard angel food with white-iced sides and a black 45 rpm record (complete with grooves) with the standard "Happy Birthday, Marianna" in her wonderful script across the top. God, what memories! (My mom swore up and down that the caroussel cake was for my first birthday - go figure). You can bet that it's because of her that I know how important birthdays are and how important a from-scratch decorated cake is to children and grandchildren alike!

My mom always made our cakes from scratch, in our favorite cake flavor, and it was always a cut up cake. I love those to this day. To be able to take a normal rectangle or circle cake layer, and turn it into a horse head with a licorice mane, a giraffe with pretzel knobs on his head, a white puppy with a pink bow in her hair, a dancing flapper... Magical !
I collect the old coconut books that have the directions in them, and love making those wonderful old cut-up cakes...

Always loved my birthday cakes....simple but I loved them. Mom always made it from a box in a 13x9 pan...yellow with chocolate icing. Somewhere along the years...I fell in love with German Chocolate cake with homemade Coconut Pecan icing. That icing my mom made was to die for and I was always waiting in the wings to lick the bowl....beaters. My mom is now 83 and she has dementia and does not cook or bake...so now I make my own. But the memories I have of her baking my cakes I will always cherish.

BTW...this has been a great thread and has brought back a flood of wonderful memories for me about my childhood.

My first birthday cake was the Wilton Mickey Mouse cake. And not with the red and black outfit...but leisure suit Larry Mickey!

The next several years she used that Mickey pan to make a Smurf cake. Completely awesome! I knew my mom was the best decorator EVER.

For my son's first birthday, mom gave me the Mickey pan and that's what I used, star-tip and all!

I love the story about the 1/2 birthday, btw...

Both my mother and grandmother were incredible bakers, from homemade breads, rolls, cookies, to cakes and Danish pastries. The cake I remember the most was a 9x13 layered cake with white buttercream frosting. My mom and grandmother had spent days rolling out gumdrops, cutting them into petal and leaf shapes, sugaring them, and putting flowers together. Years later, I wanted to make a cake like that for my daughter's birthday and asked Mom how she did it. She told me and I tried it. Didn't work. I tried several different brands of gumdrops and there was no way those things would roll out. I finally gave up. Either I was doing something really wrong or in 20 years time, the recipe for gumdrops changed.

My mother has been gone for 5 years now; I kept her house and sold mine....I swear once in a while when I come into the kitchen early in the morning I can smell homemade bread baking.

I agree with NuttyNanny...this thread has been wonderful.