The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Cookbook has been bringing joy to children and despair to parents for 45 glorious, frosting-splattered years. Can you believe it? It seems like only yesterday I was watching on rapturously as my mother lit five candles on my chocolate log-fenced farmyard cake. Oh, how wonderful that day was! And yet here I am, several decades later – a jaded old woman who still has no chocolate-logged farmyard to call her own. Not even one lousy plastic cow. 

But I have once again found myself swept up in the magic and nostalgia that this cookbook continues to foster upon hearing the news that the Royal Australian Mint will be releasing a new collection of coins featuring the most popular cakes from the book. 

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Credit: Are Media / Australian Women's Weekly

Working in collaboration with newsXpress and The Australian Women’s Weekly, the mint has created the coins as a way to immortalise this classic slice of Aussie culture, that’s become a beloved rite of passage for young children and frazzled, sleep-deprived parents everywhere. 

There will be 12 different coins to collect, with the collection based on the most popular cakes from the book, including the Choo-Choo Train, the Swimming Pool, Robert the Robot, the Rubber Duck and the queen of them all – the Dolly Varden. 

The concept of the collection all came from an Australian Mint team member stumbling across a copy of The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Cookbook in a bookstore. They realised it would make for a fun coin program. 

Credit: Royal Australian Mint

It has taken two years for that idea to come full circle, with the coins due to be released on June 12. They will be available exclusively from newsXpress newsagents. 

For more details closer to the date of release, head to the Royal Australian Mint website or Facebook page. 

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