About the cakes.

I have been getting a lot of questions about the birthday cakes. Why don't I just buy them ( well there is the peanut thing...) and why so elaborate? Well, it's pretty simple. It's my mother's fault.

My mother made every birthday cake I ever had ( except one...I begged for a store bought cake for my 12th birthday. It was terrible.) Sometimes they were elaborate, sometimes not. When I moved away to go to college ( ha!) she mailed me a birthday cake. Yep. In the mail. It was gingerbread. She sent the frosting too, and decorations.

For my eighth birthday she made a giant number 8, yellow with orange polka dots. We were in Western Australia and she had trouble getting the ingredients, but she did it. She had chicken pox at the time. I thought about that a lot this year. I was so sick leading up to Crusty's birthday I wasn't sure I could pull off the cake he asked for. I had even planned out how I could walk Patrick through it from the couch. It wasn't any fun to do, but it wasn't too hard and it was worth it. In spades.

The year after the store bought cake my Mom made me a magicians hat. It was huge and hollow. The cake was filled with tiny ice cream bunnies. Each of the bunnies contained a chocolate drop. Rabbit out of a hat and all. Even my 13 year old self thought it was mighty cool!

There were lots of other cakes, Cinderella, a Wizard of Oz cake with a yellow brick road, a jungle themed cake and a sixteenth birthday cake that had one of those porcelain dolls on top. It was prissy and totally unlike my 16 year old self. But I loved it. I still have that embarrassing doll.

As I got older Jell-O "cheesecake" became the order of the day. I know it isn't really cheesecake, but you know what? I like it better. I have a long history with Jell-O "cheesecake" but that is a different post entirely.

It's funny, I really miss my Mom at my birthday. I miss someone making a fuss over me. I miss a home made cake just for me. It's hard. This year the boys surprised me with a homemade cake on my birthday. It might not have been beautiful, but it was delicious and it made me cry and I loved it.

So, I make birthday cakes because my Mom did. It's simple and it's hard and for me it feels like love.