As I mentioned earlier, you really need to have cake to make some occasions - birthday parties, etc. - work, although you never need an excuse to make the cake in the first place. These are tasty, basic cupcakes that will be welcomed both at birthday parties and as an afternoon snack with a cup of coffee, so they're a good choice whether you need or just want a cupcake fix. The cake is light, tender and has a lovely buttery flavor from the buttermilk. The frosting is a quick and easy type of buttercream that is a great topping for just about any flavor of cake, although I think that the contrast of vanilla cake with chocolate frosting is a classic one.

The recipe is after the jump.

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!

What is a birthday party without a birthday cake? A disappointing celebration, that's what. Any dessert can be appropriate for a birthday if you stick a candle on top, but a lovely cake doesn't need candles to be appropriate - especially if the birthday boy/girl doesn't want to think about how many candles should be topping of that cake. This cake recipe is from Cooking Light and is a lovely, easy-to-make layer cake.

The cake itself is light and moist, and the frosting is fantastic. The brown sugar mix melts in your mouth and develops a slight crunch on the outside as it sets. I had to double the original recipe to make enough frosting to cover the cake and a tiny bit left over that was a great dip for some pretzel sticks. I would make the icing alone again and serve dipped pretzels as a salty-sweet snack food, but I wouldn't hesitate to make the whole cake again, either. I just need another occasion.

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!

Most families have one person who is responsible for baking the cakes for birthdays and other occasions. It might be a grandmother who bakes her famous coconut cake everyone loves or an enthusiastic child whose greatest love is elaborately decorating sheet cakes made with box mixes, but there is always one. When you are that one person, sometimes you run out of ideas. Even grandma must get tired of her coconut cake every once in a while.

Birthday Cakes: Recipes and Memories from Celebrated Bakers is a good book to get inspired by.

The book is packed with stunningly beautiful cakes, recipes to go with them and stories from bakers who moved from being "the one" in their family to making a career out of something that they loved to do. Recipes come from cooks like Alice Waters, Julia Child, James Beard and Alice Medrich. They are cakes that will take birthdays and other celebrations to a new level, not just variations on the same old thing, so if you're up for the challenge of tacking something new, like a Princess Cake, you will be well rewarded when it is met with oohs and aahs at serving time.

Today is the last day to enter Slashfood's Birthday Cake Photo Contest. The deadline for entries is midnight Tonight, August 23rd. At that point, we will no long accept any photos (not that will be eligible to win, anyway) into our Birthday Cake Contest Flickr group. Your dedicated Slashfood team will then begin the long process of judging the photos and wishing we had thought to request samples of the delicious looking cakes!

You still have plenty of time to take a picture and upload it, so keep your camera with you in case you spot any photo-worthy cakes during the day. There are prizes at stake, so why not take a chance?

The winners will be announced here on Friday morning, so stay tuned to find out which photos take the cake.

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.

August marks the one year anniversary of Slashfood's launch. Somehow, it seems longer than that - but that's a good thing! While we were thinking of ways to celebrate, we decided that instead of trying to collect gifts, we would have a contest and give one away to a reader.

We love food porn from our other blogging friends, and we're not half bad photographers ourselves, but we know that some of you readers are just as good if not better. So, Slashfood's Birthday Cake Photo Contest is a chance for you to show off your skills by taking the best photo you can of birthday cake. Chocolate or vanilla, cupcake or layer cake, frosted or cream-filled... the options are endless, but it would be best if you top if off with a candle for us.

Once you have taken your picture, you have to upload it to our Birthday Cake Contest Flickr group by midnight on Wednesday, August 23rd. We will judge the photos and announce the winners on Friday, August 25th. Be sure to add a description to your photo once you've listed it on our Flickr group stating your name, or the name you would like us to announce. We will contact the winners via Flickr

The prizes? The winner will receive a copy of The Cake Book, and the runner up will get Crazy About Cupcakes.

The US Army celebrated its 231st birthday with cake. A very, very big cake. The ingredient list included 540 eggs, 100 pounds of flour, 30 pounds of butter, 30 gallons of milk and 30 pounds of sugar and it took 17 chefs about 1 week to create. How did it work? It was constructed from layered individual sheet cakes - 50 of them, to be precise. 35 gallons of icing were used to cover and decorate the cake. The finished product was 8.5 feet long by 3 feet wide and weighed more than 250 pounds. It was served at the Pentagon June 14th to approximately 1,500 people.

Elsewhere in the country, individual divisions had their own celebrations with even more cakes.

Granted, this cake - which is still very impressive - doesn't come close to rivaling the world's largest birthday cake, which was built last year in Las Vegas and used 30,000 half-sheet cakes and 40,000 pounds of frosting. The end result was a cake which weighed in at 65 tons.

There is one more cake close-up after the jump, as well as a picture of the world's largest birthday cake.

You only turn 32 once and Victoria Beckham knows it. The wife of footballer David Beckham and former Spice Girl celebrated her birthday with a blowout dinner party at the couple's Madrid home. The highlight of the night was unquestionably the dinner. They flew in Mark Edwards, head chef at London's Nobu, and his team to serve a meal at a cost of £200 per person ($350). There was also a significant cost to Beckham just to pry the chef away for a night, reportedly in the neighborhood of £10,000. The meal consisted of 11 courses, including Posh's favorite edamame and scallops, seared salmon with tomato and miso, a variety of sashimi, grilled sea bass, low-fat seared steak, skewered beef, dumplings, exotic fruits and sorbet desserts. There was also a birthday cake, of course, served with green tea and chocolates.

A few days ago, we posted that our geeky (but lovable) cousin, Engadget, had turned two years old, and to celebrate, the engadget team sponsored a birthday cake contest.

Lots and lots of engadgeteers sent in stories and photos of birthday cakes, and Engadget has chosen the winner of the Alienware gift - the cakeis "working" Palm Treo. Take a peek at some of the prize-winning cakes, some of which could rival professional pastry chefs!

I've told the story to many a friend about how I appointed myself the birthday cake baker a few months into my first job out of college. When I made the decision, there were only nine investment bankers in our group. Nine cakes a year? Piece of, umm, an exhibit in an offering memorandum. No problem.

But soon our group was 27 strong and I was baking all the time, getting requests for special desserts, and generally kicking myself for stepping up. What should I do when my own birthday approached? I sucked it up and ate the cardboard-tasting grocery store cake that was the reason I'd decided to start baking for my co-workers in the first place.

Like Kelli, I'd much rather make my own birthday cake (and have, many a year). She fixed herself a delicious-sounding concoction of chocolate, hazelnut, ganache, genoise, mocha filling... yum. She provides general instructions, along with some links to recipes, if you'd like to recreate it for your own special day.