Allen's Lollies and Women's Weekly recreate Iconic 'Party Cake Book' and we tried to make one

Growing up in the 80s and 90s in Australia meant that you got some pretty amazing birthday cakes - all thanks to the iconic Australian Women's Weekly Party Cake book. Our mums would have carefully baked, cut shapes and decorated, following the beautiful and creative instructions and pictures in the book.

If your mum was particularly good at that kind of thing, you may have even got to choose which cake you'd like for your birthday party.

Well, life has got a whole lot busier now and when you find a hack that cuts down the time to create an insta worthy cake for your precious son or daughter without handing it over to the professionals – you take that hack and run with it!

Thankfully Allen's Lollies have come to the rescue. With Allen's turning 130, they've decided to celebrate by reimagining our favourite birthday cake book, allowing us to once again feel like domestic goddesses at birthday time without having to spend hours in the kitchen!

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And with 38 short cut cakes to choose from, the Allen’s Party Cake Book means we can confidently hand it over to our kids and ask "which cake do you want for your birthday this year," knowing we won't be stuck in a hot kitchen baking to create the cake!

At Yahoo! Lifestyle we tested out their Lollytastic cake to see just how easily a social worthy cake is to recreate.

1. First, it said to level the store-bought cakes and remove the icing, throwing it away - well I'm not ashamed to say that I threw a lot of it in my mouth (perks of being the chef right!)

2. Then remove the centre of three of the cakes using a cookie cutter (extra hack from me, save those and make two mini cakes sandwiched and iced in buttercream – you are welcome!)

3. Next, assemble the three layers, cementing (technical term) with buttercream.

4. Carefully pour in the jellybeans and then attach the top layer with the icing and coat the entire cake with leftover icing and put it in the fridge to harden.

5. Prepare a second coloured bowl of buttercream and then ice top and sides of cake. Then decorate with your favourite Party Mix lollies - and voilà you are a master baker.

Okay so my instructions may be a bit sketchy but if I can do it, anyone can – perhaps follow the proper instructions in the book instead of mine.

And in case all of this hasn't made you hungry enough for a bit of a sugar rush, here are some facts about our favourite Aussie lollies!

• Allen’s produces enough Party Mix to decorate over 12 million birthday cakes each year! (Phew, we won't run out then!)

• The team at Allen’s has created over 1,000 different types of lolly in the last 130 years – lovingly made in Victoria since 1891. Some of the more unusual lollies included a jelly tongue (we'll take it over real tongue any day), and a giant jelly rat!

• Australians’ favourite Allen’s lollies are Snakes Alive and Party Mix

• Around 240 million Snakes Alive are made in a year – if you lined them up head to tail, they’d stretch 36,000 kilometres – enough to wrap around the moon three times or right around the world at least once!

The new Allen’s Party Cake Book is free with the purchase of any three Allen’s or Bakers Choice products in a single transaction, at participating Coles supermarkets.

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