Even Novices Can Bake a Bribery Cake
Inspired by an Australian baking book from the ’80s, Simple Cakes gets creative with occasions
“I’m trying to get that cake in your mouth as soon as possible,” writes Odette Williams, apron designer, Brooklyn resident, Australia native, and cake enabler. Her new cookbook, Simple Cake, is based on a few fundamental tenets: You can have cake every day. Baking doesn’t have to be a big deal. And cake has the power to make the people in your life, including you, happy.
The muse for Simple Cake is The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book. Published in 1980, it’s an iconic cookbook for a generation of Australian children: Williams included.
In the introduction, Williams shares a photo of her young self blowing out the candles on a bunny-shaped cake, noting that her recently divorced father, at the time in his 30s, had followed a recipe from the book to bake it. This would have been out of his comfort zone, she says. “It was a bittersweet discovery, a happy childhood memory I’d forgotten about that I suddenly wish I could thank him for.”
His death a few years ago spurred her to put her own recipes to the page, creating this modern analog that her children, or anyone, can thumb through to pick the cake they want for that special…
