A few weeks ago, my younger daughters had a party to celebrate their ninth birthdays. I made pizza and fairy bread and sausie rolls and vegie puffs and fruit and lolly kebabs and meringues and frog ponds.
Scooped out oranges, orange jelly made with the juice, multi-coloured sprinkles, spearmint leaves and Freddo Frogs on top. The children loved them.
Orange frog ponds
Set aside the election for a few minutes, and indulge in memories of the food of your childhood. Did you have birthday parties? What special food did you have?
Thank you. It’s immensely reassuring that frog ponds, of which I’d never heard until now, exist and will continue to exist whatever the election outcome
Chocolate crackles, honey joys, home-made sausage rolls and Mum made the most amazing Mr Men-shaped birthday cakes.
Midwinter barbecue on a proper fire on the mountain slope outside our back yard. A clock cake – pink icing, with glace cherries for the numbers and angelica clock hands – up to age 12. The clock cake also came in handy for half-birthdays (as an only child I was able to get away with such a concept) – with the big hand pointing to 6 instead of 12…
If you eat Fairy Bread every day, you will stay young forever.
I stopped eating Fairy Bread over 30 years ago, and since then my skin has got wrinkled, my hair has turned grey and fallen out.
Let this be a lesson to you all.
Sorry, will be extraordinarily unpopular for this, but the browny things on top definitely come across as a bit, well, “suss”.
Ok, ok, they sound delicious.
I thought the time of these regular little events with the mums cooking up some treats and the neighbourhood kids ’round, with maybe their mums/parents bringing something yummy as well.
Think about: homecooked pies, lamingtons, orange or apple cakes with icing, cream puffs, homemade icecream, cupcakes- and not a rotten yank burger chain in sight!
Days of Future Past…
I had one birthday party when I was a kid, but these are some of the things my mother knocked up regularly using the Metters no 3. Butterfly cakes, anzac biscuits the size of dinner plates, thinner and crisper than you can imagine, stews on cold winter days topped with dumplings so light they had to be tied down, golden syrup dumplings with lashings of cream, pasty slices, jam tarts, lemon meringue tarts, wobbly Lion jelly……
Fairy bread!
Even today at my little niece and nephews birthday parties, most of the fairy bread my sister makes is consumed by the adults of our vintage.
And frog ponds my mother used to make for our childhood parties were always lime jelly in small plastic bowls. The chocolate frogs and candied spearmint leaves where the same as the OP.
Fairy bread rules ok.
Butterfly cakes, home made sausage rolls
Fairy bread.
Some chocolatey thing made with milk and chocolate stuff from a packet that you put in the fridge to set. The name escapes me.
Lemon Delicious.
Licking the bowl after my mother made chocolate cake.
Chocolate crackles.
Iced Vo-vos. (Do they still exist?)
Chocolate monties.
Fish and chips every Friday.
In summer the cold meats and salads or BBQ and curried egg sandwiches
In winter the old fashioned mince or salmon morneys, individual little pies, pasties & sausage rolls
At both trifles (wine!) jellies, chocolate mouse, cold milk puddings, banana splits or nut sundaes the feather light sponges and home made fruit cakes Yeah bring the good stuff back
Never went for the sweet stuff at birthday parties. Best food on offer was the coloured pickled onions, carrot sticks, and the yummy white bread (what a treat) cheese or ham salad sandwiches. Mmm. Make my mouth water today.
Paul Burns @ 10, I think you are describing what my partner’s late father used to call Phosphatine, which is a long-established French-made baby food.
There are still equivalents available, particularly at smaller delis. And they go down a treat, especially in summer.
(Fingers crossed that I did the html stuff properly this time…)
In the 1950′s: chocolate crackles, fairy bread, tiny pink sausages (‘saveloys’?); ice cream. Played “pin the tail on the donkey” and whatever was in fashion for little boys, e.g. capes & wooden swords, Robin Hood, hooning around on trikes. ‘Toffee apples’ were popular at school fetes but not so much at birthday parties, I think.
In the 1980′s: cup cakes, fairy bread, and an elaborate birthday cake copied from the “Women’s Weekly” book of amazing cakes. And ice cream. Played chasey, “what’s the time, Mr Wolf?”, pass the parcel.
Fiona,
This was a desert that you bought near the jellies. Its not phospherine. I’d remember the name if I saw it. Its not on supermarket shelves any more. I’ve actually gone looking for it. Mello or something like that I think.
Party pies and sausage rolls and Dead Horse. Funny, I’ve never liked tomato sauce on anything much, except for Aus-style pies and sausage rolls – but on these things, I have to have it. (On Battered Savs, too, it’s a necessity.)
In case j_p_z is here, Dead Horse = tomato sauce = ketchup.
PaulBurns – I can’t remember the English name but I think the Italian version of the chocolate dessert was called Budino. We also had a similar custard made with cornflour, eggs and grated chocolate which was served with baked pears.
My mother was a great cook as were so many women then, and I can recall many of the things already mentioned like golden syrup dumplings and a beautiful beef stew with parsley dumplings (featherlite as noted above). Best memories of all were Sunday evenings when we never knew how many people would be there for dinner and the table was laden with cold meats (corned beef from Saturday and roast meat from Sunday lunch), a great range of salads and a large variety of desserts. It was a noisy event and there was a rush to grab a seat at the table in the dining room where the more interesting (i.e. usually of the opposite sex) guests would be, rather than at the kitchen table or the small tables often dragged in from the verandah.
My father was the king on Mondays when there were often leftovers still to be utilised. These he would magically turn into what we used to call “the magical Monday mystery box”, usually delicious but sometimes inedible!
Food memories are a fabulous trigger for inviting conversation and bringing people together – great for working with migrant communities and assisting with migrants attaining English language skills through the use of pictures.
Great stuff.
Birthday parties, is it then? What a lot of milksops!
Why when I was a lad, every day at dawn before we trudged off to our illegal child-labor jobs at the scar-tissue factory (where we worked 22 hours a day as Cudgel Boys, being hit on the head with sharpened wooden cudgels), our dads made us spend two hours every morning out in the swamp, standing on one sprained ankle in brackish snake-infested water all the way up to our noses, so our nostrils would juuuust touch the pond scum. And as a special treat on our birthdays, our dads would let us stand in the swamp with our mouths slightly above the surface, so the mosquitoes could bite our lips til they swelled to the size of Michelin tires. The truck ones.
Then our mums and dads would feed us special stale month-old birthday bread garnished with thumbtacks and dead houseflies, and make us watch Ben Affleck movies from the future which our dads got by traveling to 2003 in the broken-down old 1956 Ford time machines they kept out in the musty garage. None of the new fancy-pants Audi time-machines back in those days, no sir! And if there were any pretty girls acting in the Ben Affleck movies, our dads would deliberately skip past those scenes, and then hit the repeat button again and again whenever Ben Affleck had a monologue or a close-up.
Then it was off to work in the factory with a note from our dads pinned to the tattered lapels of our sandpaper coats, telling the shop steward that today was our birthday, so could we have an extra-special round of cudgeling with one of the brand new aluminum models, if you please, guvnor.
If we were lucky!
#10, good news- Iced vo-vo’s still exist, but at prohibitive prices on the current supermaket shelves, unless you can crack a week when they are low-code.
But no, they are one thing that is not nice with tomatoe sauce. Id agree there.
The other thing that deserves mantioning from the mid sixties is “spag bog”, the nation’s baptism in multicultural cooking, along with chopsuey.
@ paul burns, we used to sometimes get a thing called Oetker instant dessert mix or Oetker pudding mix, it came in vanilla, strawberry and chocolate and definitely from the dessert aisle near the jellies (I am most tickled because in looking this up I have just found that in Dutch it’s called Dr. Oetker Kookpudding Chocolade.
Kookpudding, ha.
Hi Rebekka, ages ago that was the brand I used. Not sure if it is still around, but will check at our local “gourmet” supermarket (not one of the multinats) which has a superb range of exotica – including local exotica.
Watch this space.
Paul Burns @ 10
Was the dessert you remember a kind of “junket”?
I was never fond of it, much preferring the very basic custard made with custard powder, preferably thick and lumpy. (Made a batch once over a camp fire. It wouldn’t set, so I kept adding powder. Suddenly it set in a second. You could hardly swallow the thick, gluey result.)
Yes Ambigulous, what happened to Junket? You never hear about it except in connection with people in high office flying places at public expense. My mum used to make it in the 60s, but even in those hooray-for-packet days, I never really trusted anything made with a tablet. I should use my google-fu and find out how to make the original (is it the same as syllabub I wonder?) In those days, of course, we were supposed to be living on tablets in a few years time, AKA The Future, and thank heavens that one never came to pass.
Helen, the syllabub is much more similar to zabaglione than to junket. Eggs, wine, sugar and – in the case of syllabub – cream. Junket, on the contrary, relies upon rennet: that’s what was in that little tablet.
Forgive me for not venturing out of my nice warm study to find the appropriate recipes – but I have no doubt that a google or so will get then for you.
Little boys, Ambigulous.
Paul Burns @15, I think you’re talking about instant puddings. Made by Cottees, I think.
Fritz and sauce sandwiches, tuna mornay, buttered pikelets, yoyo biscuits, monte carlos, honey joys. Yummmm!
Ambigulous @23. Junket eeuuww! The most God awful stuff along with swedes, turnips and marshmallow, although you can’t make a proper pasty without swede and turnip in the mix.
There I was, 4 years old at Mile End Emergency, tonsils out and brought up on a diet of Peter Ponsil and his tonsils, expecting a lovely bowl of delicious Amscol icecream. And what do they turn up with? Bloody junket! I don’t think I’ve ever been more outraged.
Helen @24, junket is nothing like syllabub. It’s made with tablets made of rennet from cows intestines, I think. You poured warm milk over the tablets, stirred to dissolve them and waited for it to set. All I can say is bleahhh!
Creamed rice was another favourite for me. I was never all that fussed on rice pudding and I much preferred boiled egg custard to baked egg custard except if it was bread and butter pudding with lashings of cream.
Chocolate crackles, of course. Butterfly cakes. Meringues.
My mum used to make cream-puff swans ‘swimming’ on a round mirror with flowers round the edge, and merry-go-round birthday cakes with cardboard-cutout horses covered in silver paper that actually did go round and round.
Hi Fiona, you can definitely still get it – I think it’s kosher, so you might try a specialty shop.
And you can definitely still get junket tablets – just checked Woolworth’s online:
Hansells Junket Tablets 9g
$3.21
And apparently the ingredients consist of: “A Junket tablet consists of lactose, arrowroot, calcium lactate, the coagulating enzyme that turns the milk to curd and whey (once rennin, from a cow’s fourth stomach, but these days synthesised), natural colours and flavouring.”
Source
(Can you tell I’m procrastinating?!)
Chocolate crackles,butterfly cakes,fairy bread and patty cakes(now called cup cakes). Cocktail frankfurts and sausage rolls.Fizzy drinks.
Pass the parcel and pin the tail on the donkey. Bags of lollies and a slice of birthday cake to take home, sometimes a balloon as well.
So happy to hear that kids do still have parties with “party” food,not a bowl of lentils and a tofu sandwich.
Junket is yucky, but I do remember that chocolate instant pudding.I think it was one of my favourites.
Chopsuey, my mums attempt at Chinese cooking, it was ghastly. A mixture of mince,cabbage, soy sauce and beans that still had the strings attached. Erkk.
Frog ponds look spectacular, never seen that before, I’ll have to remember that one.
Pity the child who opened the ‘fridge door while the jelly or junket was setting!
We had just about all the above – fairy bread, saveloys, powder puffs, ice-cream cake (‘neapolitan’), plus faces iced onto milk arrowroot biscuits – using Smarties for the eyes etc. Centrepiece was always the cake: Humpty Dumpty sitting on his Wall, or a train …..
The question on my mind now is will my ancient mother get out of hospital in time to prepare my usual birthday requests. I don’t see why a broken ankle should stop her making the mock chicken sandwiches, at least. Maybe the apple pie, as well ….
Thanks for the junket information… but I do feel sorry for the Yorkshire lads @19. The only positive part is that fond memory has softened the edges of a truly ghastly existence. It was 12 and a half times worse than he says.
Zenger eh? Tidied up his moniker from Zengwright to avoid schoolyard scorn??
jane @ 26,
I think that’s the one. Will have to rusah out and buy it. (Gawd, that means I’ll have to buy milk. Never drink the stuff.)
It wasn’t junket. You break junket up it looks like spew. This Cottee’s chocolate thing was nice.