Birthday Cake
Memo to my sisters' kids: when we were little, we didn't have friends over for birthday parties. Birthdays were just family, and we'd get to have some favorite food for dinner, and then Grandma & Grandpa C. would show up with ice cream, and we'd eat cake and ice cream and the grown-ups would drink coffee made in a Corning blue corn flower percolator.
This year and last, my parents have come up from New Jersey to celebrate my birthday, and mom brings cake. Specifically, she brings chocolate mayonnaise cake with a fairly small amount of what I guess is called butter cream frosting.
Funny story about frosting: One day in college my friend E. said something about making fake frosting for a cake. "When you don't have time to make real frosting, you can do this fake thing with butter and confectioner's sugar and vanilla..." I had to inform E. that to most Americans, this is real frosting; fake frosting comes out of a can. E. believes real frosting involves a candy thermometer.
At any rate, every year on my birthday I get myself something sweet to stick a candle in. In recent years, it's been brownies or congo bars or something. I'm usually unsatisfied by my improvised birthday cake (especially if it's actual bakery-bought cake), and I'd thought this was because I was sitting alone in my bedroom singing happy birthday to myself and blowing out a candle from a package I've had in my desk for twenty years. It's not just that, though. Now that I've had mom here with her mayonnaise cake two years in a row, I know what is really lacking on my birthday.
I can't even tell you how happy it makes me to eat birthday cake that tastes like the birthday cake I had as a kid. It would be the perfect birthday if dinner were a couple slices of plain Sicilian from Carmine's, followed by cake and coffee.
OMG - that is what has been missing from my birthdays too! C makes mayonnaise cake for her kids on their birthdays...I always look forward to it...I'm more a red-box Betty Crocker mom....
Posted by: Amanda | March 22, 2008 at 10:10 AM
Mayonnaise cake isn't all that difficult/time consuming, really. My issue is I'm not about to make a whole cake for one person.
Posted by: AppleFoot | March 27, 2008 at 11:26 PM