Beck Vass: The true cost of a child's birthday party

Beck Vass spent five hours icing her daughter's cake, which ended up staining the carpet. Photo / Getty Images

Our daughter just turned five and we had a party to celebrate.

As was tradition in my childhood, our girl, and her brother, 2-and-a-half, love looking through birthday cake books to choose their cakes.

To my surprise, I found last year's cake-making for our girl's fourth birthday quite enjoyable - apart from her soul-destroying reaction to it. So I decided to make her cake again this year.

After choosing every cake in the birthday cake book three times, she eventually settled on a Minnie Mouse one.

I combined some ideas, hopeful I could pull it off: I needed to make two round cakes. One cake for Minnie's face and the other to be cut into two circles to make her ears.

I worried about how to ice it. Whether it would be big enough and if it might end up on one of those websites where everyone laughs at your cake.

Surely my cake efforts wouldn't be this bad? Photo / Facebook

I went to the supermarket and bought three pounds of butter hoping that would be enough for the cake and the icing. It was $18 just for butter!

I went to Briscoes and bought a large cake tin and to another shop for icing colours.

Time to bake.

The cake was too flat.

So, I made another cake, to stack them together.

Then, I doubled the mixture and hoped I would have another cake the same height as the first two stacked together. Luckily, I did.

The next day, I began my ear-cutting and icing efforts. A pale peach face - fine. Pink bow and tongue - fine. Black for the ears ... pastel purple. Whaaat?

It was 6pm on a Friday and I'd just used all the black colouring.

I swung by the supermarket and was amazed to find black colouring. Then I went to a friend's place to take her extras in case it wasn't enough. Success!

After choosing every cake in the book three times she finally settled on a Minnie Mouse one. Photo / Beck Vass

The next day we held the party where even the hard-to-please birthday girl said her cake was "great".

But, the black icing I worked so hard for ended up on the carpet.

I tried my best to clean it but I ended up having to call a professional. Even he couldn't lift it. And we fed that to kids!

So, a quick tally:

• Butter x3: $18
• 25cm cake tin: $15 (half price)
• Icing sugar: $7.50
• Icing colours: $23
• Extra icing colour (black): $7
• Carpet cleaning: $75 for the cleaner's five-minute effort on a stain that remains

TOTAL COST: $145.50!

That doesn't even take into account:

• The cost of ingredients I already had in the pantry
• Three hours spent making a quadruple-cake
• Five hours of icing
• Depreciation on our house from the carpet stain
• The emotional harm resulting from calculating this just now

The next day, fishing for further kudos, I asked the birthday girl if she liked her party and her cake.

"Yeah," she said. "Except ... it didn't really look like Minnie."

"Oh, didn't it? Why didn't it look like Minnie?"

"Because Minnie doesn't have all those bumps."

I'm going to call that progress. Maybe next year's will even be a success. Hopefully it doesn't cost us the house.