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cannoli cake. the best.

i don't think i have ever had a homemade birthday cake for my birthday that i didn't make. my bday is in late august, so typically my friends weren't in town, which meant i only had a family party. family party cakes usually were store bought angel food cake, dry and yucky as i remember, with fresh fruit. not my idea of a bday cake at all! at least, not when i was nine. now that i'm all grown up and married i don't think anyone will be baking me a cake for my bday anytime soon, but that's ok. i am happy to make them for others!

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It was an 3ft tall mountain of Marzipan, covered in coconut "snow" with a marzipan skier, evergreens, and a skilift down to the gingerbread lodge...it rocked...right up until the first bite.

I made one for my boyfriend last summer for his birthday that was amazing. He loves chocolate and peanut butter so I made this cake: http://kraftfoods.com/kf/recipes/recipedetail.htm?recipe_id=97950&

It was very easy and VERY rich but everyone loved it.

My mom used to make me 7-UP cake for my birthday. We called it "pop" cake.

She also used to make a cake of a choo-choo train and it had a picture of me or my brothers in the window.

She would also make ice cream cake--that was very good too.

My mom made me a Sweet Valley High cake when I turned 13. I will never forget that cake!

I don't know if it's "spectacular" the birthday boy seemed to love it and it was the first creative cake I ever made so i love it too: http://flickr.com/photos/40040713381@N01/166286283/.The best cake I have ever received was last year's ice cream cake. I had a sliver for breakfast and dessert every day for about a month.

My mother asked me what cake I wanted one year and I showed her a castle cake complete with turrets and moat that you piece together from cake cut into various shapes. I can't even imagine how time consuming it was for her to make it for me looking back on it. As an adult I wouldn't dream of asking anyone to do something so time consuming for me.

I've made Martha Stewart's Birthday Cake several times for family and friends. It's a delicious, domed cake, quite rich, with swiss meringue butter cream, an amaretto syrup and a wonderful swiss meringue that is piped on in cool spikes and then torched. The recipe says it serves something like 8 to 12, but we found it so rich that it is better suited for 20.

For my 8th birthday I had Rubik's Cube ice cream cakes (mint chip) from Basken-Robbins. They were awesome!!

I love that the Kraft foods page thinks I want chicken with lemon--I'm on the page for CAKE! I'd be interested in other decadent chocolate things, not good-for-you chicken!

I had to comment--I'm a vegetarian, lacto-ovo, so I can have CAKE! COOKIES! PIE! Chicken is for the birds when you want cake!

I'm just going to admit it, I thought my grandmother made up that doll in a ball gown cake!

I had some winners. There was the pac-man, the roller skate cake(that was SOME party - couple skate!), and then my mom made mud pie (the oreo, ice cream and fudge kind) and I've never had anything else for my birthday.

Remember Carvel Ice Cream cakes? "and my new friend Cookie Puss" with the cigarette voice! Yum.

For years growing up my mom made me the doll cake. And you know, I did appreciate it even then... my mom didn't really love cooking (unlike me), and since she worked full-time as a teacher, didn't spend much of her time baking, either. But she did make that cake for me, every year, for years. And you know, I still love it! Thanks mom!

I made a 4-layer chocolate cake with vanilla frosting and decorated with it halved Cadbury eggs that had plastic dinosaurs coming out of them.

The hamburger cake at around age 10. It's a triple layer cake with 2 white cakes and a chocolate one in the middle with marzipan coloured and shaped to make bits of "cheese", "lettuce", and "tomatoes" sticking out.

When I turned 9, my mother made me a cake that looked like a gumball machine. If I had the picture with me I would scan it and post the link. It was the coolest cake ever.

check out the stop-animation cake video...
my friend made a wonderful - and huge - cake for my joint bday party with my cousin. It is masterful, as is the video!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ggjh7NFThn8

My mother made the best cakes! We didn't have much money when I was young, but she was buying these elaborate molds of bugs bunney and raggedy ann at first. Then she left the molds and made a giraffe one year, and an alien space craft another year, and the best was a catapillar - a bundt cake cut in half and offset to make an S shape, with shoelaces sticking out and candies all over the place. It was always so much fun!

i got the best birthday "cake" this year. i was really excited to be presented with a cake at my birthday party, but when i licked some of the "icing" off of my finger, i knew something was up. i cut into the cake, and found out that my friend made me a cake out of MEAT LOAF and "iced" it with mashed potatoes! best birthday cake EVER!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/semarr/1538026554/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/semarr/1538018064/

I turned 39 in March... my 9 year old niece made me a birthday cake all by herself (ok, with a little help from her step-mom)!!! THE BEST CAKE EVER!

My mom had a cut-out cake book that showed you how to cut up rectangular and round cakes and piece together, frost, and decorate them into fantastic creations. I remember some really elaborate ones, a huge butterfly, an entire train, a space ship, etc. We loved those cakes so much and always felt so special knowing how much time mom invested in them. My mom also took Wilton cake decorating classes, and when we got older, would make beautiful cakes covered in flowers. One year for my birthday, she made cupcakes for my entire class and each was topped with a huge orange rose with yellow tipped petals! Yay mom!

well, I made my husband a banana-bourbon cake that was pretty amazing (the filling had a sour cream base), and I made a red velvet cake for a friend. My husband always bakes me a marble cake, which has become his specialty, and which I love.

His favourite cake though was one I didn't bake -- some little old Italian grandmother did. a couple of weeks before his birthday, we were sitting in an Italian restaurant, finishing dessert, when I asked him what he wanted for his birthday. He replied, a Zuccoto. "you mean, like you're eating now?!" -"No, a WHOLE one, ALL to MYSELF!". Boy was he surprised! (I had ordered one from the lady who supplies them to the restaurant)!

My daughter's favourite cake was a hippopotamus cake. For weeks before she turned 3, she whispered in my ear that all she wanted was a hippopotamus cake. Have no idea what put the idea in her head, except that we had been reading Sandra Boynton a lot together. I special ordered it, and it was gorgeous! A slab cake covered with a turquoise fondant, and a huge Boynton hippo on top. The inside was pretty amazing too...

So while we generally do bake birthday cakes at home, the most memorable ones were the ones we DIDN'T make

wow, my roomie and his girlfriend (who was a close friend at the time) surprised me with a poppy seed cake - holy frick was it tasty! it was purple on the inside with green frosting on the outside.

those two were so awesome to me.

My mom used to make all kinds of wonderful cakes for us when we were kids. While I cannot recall any of the ones she made for me, specifically, I remember the hamburger cake she made for my little sister, mainly because it had been put in the laundry room to keep it out of the way while the party went on, and the hot water hose sprung a leak. Steam and icing do not mix.

I'm not remotely artistic when it comes to making cakes, but I did give it a good shot for my husband's 40th birthday. I suspect this Cthululu cake will be the most memorable birthday cake I will ever make.

I am a pretty good baker, but I've only made a decorated cake once. It was for a nephew's birthday. I bought the Wilton's Garfield cake pan and made the cake from scratch.

Unfortunately, the decorating aspect of it did not go as well. The poor cat looked like a victim of radiation poisoning. I remember the haunted look in its eyes.

It tasted just fine, though.

My nephew is all grown up and he reminds me of that cake, now and then. It seems to have traumatized him enough that he can recall it clearly even twenty years later.

That's when I remind him of the time he hid a Tupperware container with a Han Solo action figure encased in ice in my freezer. I still have that.

No photos survived of the cake, so at least I have plausible denial. He doesn't.

I can't wait until he has kids.

Boston Cream Cupcakes, like the pie but in cupcakes! YUM

Tazer - I had a Raggedy Ann cake one year too! I think I was three but I still remember it...

The next year it was a 3-D rainbow cake with lemon cake and frosting, and I literally still remember the taste. It's so distinct in my mind.

My mom made me angel food cakes in a tube pan with a cardboard circle frosted over to cover the hole, my favorite part. The magical secret was the swirly pink and green colors through out the white cake. She food dyed the batter and blopped it through the pan and swirled the sections with a spatula. She put pink flowers, green leaves on with her frosting gun, and always put a big bouquet of azaleas beside it.

My mom did a smurf village when I was 6. She used cupcakes to make the smmurf houses and it was complete with figurines and all.

my mom made me a bunny cake when i was about 5. i think she used two round cakes, one for the face, then split the other to make ears. she frosted it with cream cheese frosting and then covered it in shredded coconut for fur! she used red licorice whips for whiskers. we have pictures somewhere. it was super yummy.

when i was young, we had a lot of those baskin robbins upsidedown cone things at my birthday parties. which were, in retrospect, gross. then the carvel ice cream cakes (btw, cookie puss did have kind of a creepy voice on those commercials), which are still delicious. those chocolate crunchies rock.

but since i was about 10, i have always had banana cake with cream cheese frosting. my grandma's recipe. nothing better.

my mom's family is from the midwest, and all their cakes were always homemade (i guess partly for economic reasons). when my mom turned 16, she remembers that she got a bakery cake, which she thought was just the cat's meow and a sign that she was really important. now, my sister and i wouldn't dare have a bakery cake for a birthday, and think that homemade cakes are a much greater sign of love.

My husband's grandmother always ALWAYS has made his birthday cakes. They STILL talk about the "computer" cake (complete with keyboard! vintage Apple IIC!) that she made when he was 8 or 9. I've seen pictures. It was pretty cool.

But one year I decided to make a fun cake for his birthday and I made a "Homestar Jr." cheeseburger cake (it will only make sense if you've watched a particular short from Homestarrunner.com) and it turned out quite well, if I do say so myself.

Now, she's a great-grandmother and made my son's first birthday ABC block cake. But maybe next year I'll get a chance to try a cake creation of my own.

I had a cake that was made to look like a stage, with plastic ballerinas and stage lights and everything. Not too mind blowing, but it sure made 5-year-old me VERY happy. I still have the ballerinas, though I haven't done anything with them in ages.

Gotta plug my friend's blog while I'm here. Great inspiration for cakes that are so awful in either idea or execution that they end up kind of great, or at least memorable. http://uglysheetcake.blogspot.com

My mom did that bunny cake, too.

Hamburger cakes seem to be popular! I've made two for friends' birthdays in the past... once for a "Cheeseburger in Paradise" themed party and one for a "Do you really need a theme to eat a hamburger shaped cake" party...

For the latter: http://flickr.com/photos/25605581@N00/2155955616/

The best cake I've received was on my ninth birthday, my aunt made me a cake where the second layer was a number 9! It was decorated in white frosting with pink flowers.

I've since made a "3" shaped cake for my son, a sponge-bob-square-pants and Garfield cakes for my nephew (his request, not my idea). I am a firm believer that birthdays should be accompanied by a home made cake. It speaks volumes of love and tenderness.

I know this is a late posting, but last year I made the best cake for my daughter's 10th birthday. I made the "Bonnie Butter" cake in the old Betty Crocker cookbook recipe, which is a vanilla butter layer cake, very dense and soft. Then I made a whipped penuche frosting which I flavored with fresh lemon juice and tinted a soft pink. This type of frosting is glossy and soft--the texture of melted marshmallow, but it had the brightness of lemon. The cake was sublime. Unfortunately, not a crumb was left over after the party.