One of the things I always tell children is that the greatest thing about being an adult is never having to ask for permission to eat ice cream. Here’s an addendum: you don’t need permission to spend 10 euros on a used copy of the Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book.

This isn’t news to anyone I know, but I love cake. I love cake, and I love writing about cake: Eid cakes, the blighted Black Forest cake, Christmas cakes. But I don’t necessarily love birthday cake: I have cycled through all sorts of feelings about my birthday: it’s not important to me, it’s a letdown, it’s the start of a new era, etc etc. The inevitable result is that I have not had birthday cake in years; but who does, really, after the age of birthday parties? With friends, I have slices of cake on/around my birthday, a couple of years ago, I bought a cake late in the evening of my birthday: the Dudok cheesecake, arguably the best cheesecake available in a Dutch supermarket; there was one wretchedly disappointing birthday when I ordered a cake in a cup from a bakery just to feel some vestige of festiveness, just to tell myself I’d done something to mark the day.

But this is a book of birthday fantasies. I longed for any of these designs when I was younger, any one of these cakes would have been a gift in and of itself. I really wanted the doll cake -- my one attempt at having it recreated in Pakistan did not look anything like my illustration, drawn from memory of this book.

I can’t — and don’t wish to — relive birthdays, but this book is a reminder of what it was like to be utterly charmed and delighted by something. There is the memory: weekend afternoons, stretching out on a bed, the inevitability that you have run out of things to see or read, and so you are flipping through the pages of recipe books when you are too young to cook. In these pages -- deceptively simple ingredients, mind-baffling construction -- you begin to realise what cake could be. So much of my imagination is drawn from this book; even now, even after decades, there is nothing more magical: it’s a cake as a lion! A clown! A rabbit! A duck with crisps as its beak! A swimming pool! That it could be more than the Black Forest cake, that there was something even more wildly inventive and architectural than a wedding cake in a film. As I flip through the pages, I am back there again, excited in a way that I never am by the fondant creations in bakeries now -- arguably much more fantastical than anything in this, or by the fact that one can’t tell the difference between object and dessert anymore.

It is such a hard feeling to capture, to have these days. The world is oversaturated by images that, to borrow a phrase from the pope, lack the spark of humanity; photos of creations meant to stun and do little else; the disappointment that inevitably accompanies them. Far too often, I go to bakeries, dither and dawdle, and walk out without buying anything. I always find myself thinking: that can’t possibly be good, it’s too expensive, it has one ingredient too many (pistachio, always; burned too many times by must-have lists and recommendations and viral posts and someone swearing, up and down, that this is the best thing you’ll ever eat. (I am guilty of this too.) And even though that might well be true for any of the cakes in this book, I can at least dream it might not be the case, that just this time, there is no cynicism required, just the sheer joy of imagining what a perfect birthday cake might be.