Birthday Cake Rules!

Birthday Cake rules.  That is a simple statement of pure fact.  As I get older, my delight in Birthday Cake has not waned one slice.  Even the word combination, "Birthday Cake," has an incredibly pleasant look to it.  It makes me want to wear Birthday Cake perfume, sleep on a pillow made of Birthday Cake, and kiss my husband, who's lips magically happen to be a red velvet Birthday Cake of the most delicate crumb.  Birthday Cake should always be capitalized.  Birthday Cake is important.

The Birthday Cake of my childhood was a glorious glob of over-sweet shortening and sugar, mounded over a cake made with no natural ingredients, and likely containing some sort of kid-tranquilizer.  It left your tongue fuzzy and settled in your tummy like a brick.  It was delicious!  Well, delicious in the way that paste might have been a tasty snack in Kindergarten.  It was the crown jewel of the birthday party, where, invariably, one kid always threw up blue frosting and he was happy to do it.

Birthday Cake mesmerized children like cigarettes and bourbon mesmerized our parents.  There were so many choices.  There were cakes with cowboys and indians, princess cakes, ballerina cakes (my personal fave), horse cakes, dinosaur cakes and the dreaded, yet omnipresent clown cake, to name a few.  This was before all the Toy Story and Star Wars cakes.  This was when Birthday Cakes were generic and weird.  The scene was usually some half-assed mounds of airbrushed frosting and strategically placed plastic figures with vacant eyes and toxic paint.  Apropos of nothing, there was usually plastic shrubbery as well.  None of this mattered, we couldn't get enough.  And the cakes that had frosting roses were the most coveted.  Even boys wanted a piece of cake with a rose.

One of the best things about Birthday Cakes was that it was one of the few times that you, the kid, got to make the decision.  It was one of our earliest moments of empowerment.  Our parents, grandparents, siblings and friends had to eat the cake of our choice.  In those moments, we felt proud and grown up.  And we'd better get the biggest damn frosting rose on the cake or there would be tears and tantrums.  So much for being grown up.  Maybe next year.

Last week was my husband Aaron's birthday.  I had an interview across town, but was determined to make him a Birthday Cake.  He was working all day and I knew he wouldn't tell anyone at work that it was his birthday, so I wanted him to have something special.  Aaron is not into birthdays.  I assault him with his own birthday every year.  I do the birthday dance, I make up songs proclaiming his undying majesty, and I taunt him with hints of the present carnage to come.  He really wishes I would just go away so he can play Mass Effect 2.

As I was making the cake, I felt nostalgic for the Birthday Cakes of yore.  I was using Belgian cocoa powder, cage free brown eggs and imported chocolate but that distinctive smell of lardy, bakery cake-sweetness wasn't there.  Instead, I got batter and candy sprinkles all over the kitchen, I broke the cake decorating tool and I was running late for my interview.  Why didn't I just go to a bakery and get him an Ironman cake?  I started to sweat and panic.  When I was telling my Mom about the experience while stuck in traffic on the 10 freeway she said, "Oh, that's nice," and proceeded to tell me all about their neighbor's cat that my Dad found dead in front of their house.  Oh, that's nice.

Well, my interview went fine but there was no job for me.  As I was walking the several blocks back my car (to avoid the $30 valet charge) in heels and carrying 5 lbs of presentation material, I began to despair.  I had no job, my kitchen was a complete confectionary disaster, and my feet were throbbing with every step.  I really just wanted to shove my face into an over-frosted bakery cake topped with poisonous princesses and call it a day.  Just then Aaron texted that he had gotten home and saw his celebratory tableaux and was beside himself with birthday joy.  The cake, he said, was spectacular.  Although it probably wasn't as good as playing Mass Effect 2, I could tell he was surprised and delighted.  I'm glad I baked him a cake instead of buying one.  And I think I can let go of the plastic ballerinas and embrace the Belgian cocoa powder. Birthday Cakes rule, especially the ones you make for people you love.

Cake or death, Eddie Izzard asks?  I choose Cake.  With a capital C.

The Sugar Nerd Commences

Since becoming unemployed in October, I have been doing much thinking on what I want to be doing with my life.  I sit at my command station day after day, applying for jobs that never materialize and, without fail, my mind seems to turn to baking.  I get derailed from my epic job search by visions of lemon cookies; the thought of their warm, citrusy scent comforts me far better than the cold shoulder I am getting from my computer...or of raspberry buttermilk cakes that, for even an hour, would give me a sense of purpose.  I invariably jump up and check the pantry for ingredients and start mixing.  When my husband Aaron gets home, he immediately knows something delicious is afoot and he seems to forget that he just worked a 13 hour day. It is interesting to me that I am not baking because I want to eat these marvelous odes to sugar and butter, I am baking because the process of it calms me.  It completely takes me away from the discomfort of my life right now.  It unlocks nostalgic feelings of pure childlike joy.  I float on mounds whipped egg whites and dance to the music of measuring cups clanging.  I am riding a wave of sugar rapture where my only concern is making sure I don't over bake the cream cheese brownies.  Job schmob.  A little more icing, please.  Eventually I realized that I seem to be baking more than job hunting.  This could be problematic.

Some of the jobs I have applied for ask if you have a blog or website.  I am surprised by this.  I only joined Facebook this year and I think I was the last of all my friends to get a cell phone.  It's not that I eschew technology, I would just rather not be that available sometimes.  But now employers want to gauge your potential by means other than your business related accomplishments.  I felt old and tired.  I also felt I should have a blog.  Since baking seemed to be fluttering its flour-covered jazz hands in my face, Sugar Nerd was born.

I've been making cookies, pies, cakes, loafs...all with reckless abandon and a true sense of fulfillment.  I put on my vintage apron and revel in the noisy twang of beaters whirring and eggs cracking.  My pug, Owen, lays happily in his bed, also content in the flurry of kitchen activity.

I'm still job hunting, but also embracing this nearly uncontrollable urge to bake.  And bake.  And bake.