A BIRTHDAY CAKE IS NO ORDINARY CAKE

There’s no treacle in the actual recipe included, but there’s plenty elsewhere in another birthday-celebration book from the author/illustrator of On the Day You Were Born (1991). In a very loose mélange of earth science and cookery, a birthday cake is the symbolic product of a physical year. Readers are instructed to collect snippets of the seasons—robins’ songs, falling stars “the sound of two shivers”—in a bowl, and then, with the addition of more expected ingredients, to bake a cake. There’s a soupçon of confusion about the actual span from one birthday to the next (is it 364 or 365 days?), and the metaphor may be a muddle for mud-pie makers of a more literal mind, but Frasier’s cheerful cut-paper-collage pictures are pleasing, and the cake actually tested nicely. In an effort to fold a bit of hard science into what sometimes seems a bit like a greeting card, a concluding page makes reference to tree rings and Bristlecone pines and presents a map of the solar year. (Picture book. 4-8)