When we were celebrating Slashfood's first birthday, I featured a cookbook about birthday cakes, but today deserves another birthday cake cookbook because it's my birthday, and a birthday just isn't the same without cake. If you have ever seen one of the Food Network cake challenges, you might already know who Colette Peters is. She is an extraordinarily talented baker and cake decorator who, fortunately, decided to share more than a few of her tricks in Colette's Birthday Cakes. She provides some good basic recipes to work with, including chocolate and white cake recipes, buttercreams, ganache, fondant and others. Once the basics are mastered, you can move on to the decorating. The techniques provided in the book are good, but as with most artistic things, good instructions will not necessarily result in a showpiece. There is no substitute for practice, but with the great photos, recipes and tips from Colette, your cake making will probably improve by quite a bit. Just take care not to make the cakes too elaborate or no one will want to cut in to them for a taste!

Thanks to everyone who participated in our Birthday Cake Photo Contest and helped make Slashfood's first anniversary a memorable one, though of course it is the daily readership that we appreciate, and not just the submission of a photo! It was very difficult to choose a winner from all of the excellent entries, but after much deliberation, the winning photo was the above photo of a birthday cupcake submitted by Disney Mike

The runner up was the slashed apple cake submitted by Bonnie, who got bonus points for making an extremely appropriate cake for the occasion. To take a look at her cake, and at a handful of the other entries, just click past the jump. You'll have to view the whole photo pool to see all 47 submitted photos, though!

It looks like meat ice cream isn't the only tasty treat that zoo animals are getting this summer. The giant panda Xin Xin, who resides at the Wild Animal Rescue and Breeding Center in Xi'an, China, celebrated his first birthday this month with apples, watermelon and - of course - birthday cake. We have no doubt that the cake was made with panda-friendly ingredients, but it actually looks pretty good. And Xin Xin is certainly enjoying it.

He's not the only panda to get served birthday cake, though. Click past the jump for some more pictures of pandas with their cakes.

We mentioned earlier that our sibling site, Engadget, had selected the winner in their "Bake a Birthday Cake for Engadget." The winner, who receives a grand prize of a very spacey looking Alienware contraption (I'm a food freak, not a gadget geek), baked a working Palm Treo cake.

Engadget has posted photos of all the entries over a series of posts. Take a peek - even some of the non-winning cakes are incredible!

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