Birthday Cake

Birthday Season

It’s birthday season at my house, but there will not be any birthday cake this year. As it will, time has continued its forward march and my daughter turned 21 this week but she is far away at school, and I’ll be spending my birthday at work. 

I am a big fan of birthday cake and one of the best perks of parenthood is the event of the annual cake. Looking through photgraphs of birthday parties past it’s the cakes I remember.  Some elaborate, some ordinary. The fanicest one was one made by the bakery in the Whole Foods store where I worked, and I know it got a lot of extra love and buttercream. I’m aware that many people don’t like buttercream. I am not one of them.

One year I made Rachel a cake. As much as I love to bake, I rarely take on anything complicated and that cake was complicated. The cake didn’t turn out as I had pictured, and I received some unkind criticism… I don’t remember much about the cake other than my disappointment in it and my resolve not to try again. File this under things I regret. 

The best was a cake that I didn’t make so much as assemble for my daughter’s 12th birthday. That one is a cake lives in birthday history as one of the great birthday cakes.  Made to look and taste like a Snickers Bar, it absolutely did. We still talk about that cake. If you’re looking for a kid-friendly easy to make cake, this one is a winner!

March to March

Measuring my own years from March to March, the past one has been ridiculously hard. Rather than chronicle the awful things you know about, or my own personal challenges, I will go out on a limb and declare this year will be better. I don’t need cake, I’ve been vaccinated for Covid. 

As all of us wait and watch the world slowly unfurl from the clenched fists, jaws and bellies of the past twelve months I finally allow myself to think about the next twelve. There is a new job at work I have applied for, a trip I hope to take with my daughter in late spring, and maybe seeing friends, in person.

Everyone has had at least one pandemic birthday, and possibly two. I hear warnings (and I believe them) that this pandemic will be followed by others. But, for now we celebrate on a smaller scale, and eat whatever birthday cake we can.