Recipe: Pussycat Cake by Alisha Henderson of Sweet Bakes

This story appears in our July 2025 Nostalgia issue, presented by Up, where we asked 13 professional bakers to recreate cakes from the iconic The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book.

Bake and assemble your cake as per the original book method.

I use a condensed-milk buttercream for my cakes, but your preferred buttercream will be fine here. Add some cocoa powder to regular vanilla buttercream to tint it a light shade of brown.

To begin, coat the whole cake in a thin layer of buttercream called a “crumb coat” and firm in the fridge for 15 minutes.

In a small mixing bowl, add ½ cup of shredded coconut and 2 drops of pink food dye. Stir until the coconut is covered in the dye and is light pink.

Take your cake from the fridge and make a pink coconut circle on the tummy area of the cat. Do this for the insides of the two ears.

Load a piping bag with a “shag” (or “grass”) tip and place your cocoa-tinted buttercream inside. Using the shag tip, press down and pull up to create a furry texture. Do this across the entire top surface of your cat cake.

To decorate, I snipped a white marshmallow in half to create the eyes, then added a brown Smartie for the pupil. For the nose I used a pink marshmallow, snipped in half with a little V shape to form a nose. For the whiskers, I used liquorice bullets. For the cat collar I used pink Smarties. To create the cat tail, I used a round piping tip to pipe a swirly tail onto the cake board.

The pussycat cake recipe first appeared in the The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book, published in 1980.