Tattooed with Food

So, hurray for winter birthdays, those stalwart events standing firmly between me and Seasonal Affective Disorder.

  I don’t often crave cake in the way I love a cookie or a square of milk chocolate or ice cream, which I could probably eat every day and never get sick of.  That others believe differently is obvious (think of the current explosion in popularity of cupcakes, that small mouth bomb of instant cake gratification), and I hold nothing against you if you’re a cake lover.  If you’re one of those folks who runs home at the end of a work day and whips up a small chocolate cake from scratch because you’ve been dreaming of the first bite all during your day– well, hey, I’m happy just thinking that someone out there would take the time to make him- or herself a homemade treat.  And I’d be happy to know you even if our tastes are different.

But cake, in my mind, is special occasion food.  Cake in my house is reserved for birthdays.

The Ward birthday tradition goes like this:  The person of honor on the special day may have the dinner and the cake of their dreams, and the birthday boy’s or girl’s planning often begins weeks, sometimes months, in advance.  My first hint that they’re actively planning might come in a quiet moment at the end of a school day or during an evening meal, but all I have to hear is, “For my birthday, I’m thinking I might like…” and I know we’re off.

 Over the years I’ve made marzipan cakes, flourless chocolate cakes, german chocolate cakes, carrot cakes, pound cakes, chestnut cakes and a daffodil cake.  The daffodil cake was my first birthday cake and consequently also my daughter’s.  My mother was an excellent pie baker and never felt quite confident about her from-scratch cakes.  She did a nice job with the daffodil cake, though, and I am lucky enough to have her handwritten recipe.  The cake is the color of a spring daffodil:  white angel food marbled with an egg yolk rich orange-scented sponge cake.  This can be lightly frosted with a little vanilla buttercream, and it makes the perfect young child’s cake for it is both easy to eat and easy on a young tummy.

 The alternative to a homemade cake would be a bakery cake and I’m not a huge fan, no matter how good the bakery.  I’ve worked at two bakeries myself.  The first I worked at, as a senior in high school, was an Italian bakery in my hometown.  The big selling cakes there were whipped cream cakes and the Italian rum cake– yellow cake layers doused in rum syrup and filled with alternating layers of vanilla and chocolate pastry cream.  We counter girls took orders for hundreds of these.  Almost 30 years later and I can still picture the head baker counting out the cake layers and going down the assembly line with his white plastic bucket of rum syrup, brushing the layers with a rum-soaked paint brush.

 In the second bakery, years later and working behind the scenes as a baker myself this time, we made terrific birthday cakes, especially the chocolate ones.  The frosting was even really good, a true Italian meringue buttercream, a buttercream jazzed up with a cooked sugar and egg white meringue. 

Still, I prefer making my own, even with a cake this good, for me and my family.  Baking simply pleases me.  Here are some of my favorites.