Ellen's Birthday

Ellen’s birthday is this month.  She is my sister, and everyone in our family is aware that she absolutely loves birthday cakes.

If I could, I would buy her the biggest and prettiest cake I could find this week, but since she lives in Florida and I in NY, that’s not quite practical.

So I did the next best thing, and as I stood in Stuarts trying to select a card from an amazing Papyrus selection, I found the perfect one.  It features six incredibly beautiful birthday cakes on the front page, and even has a picture of the prettiest one on the pink envelope.

As I started to address it, I thought about all the birthday cakes we had in our family starting with mine.

Each year on my birthday, Mom and I would walk to the small family owned bakery on 10th Avenue and 48th Street, and she would order “A German pound cake with white frosting and pink roses, please.”  It came in a glossy white box and was utterly beautiful, but I have no recollection of how it tasted.  However, every October I had the same birthday cake until the year the owner died, and the door to the bakery on 10th Avenue and 48th Street closed.

After we married, I made my husband his favorite cake on the first of September.  It was relatively easy, and that was truly fortunate since I entered our marriage without any knowledge of even basic culinary skills.  The cake he preferred came from a box labeled chocolate and has a simplistic confectioner’s sugar frosting.  The piece de resistance was the shaved chocolate which also came in a small glass bottle.  Voila’ and a birthday cake was served.

The first birthday cake I attempted from scratch was for our daughter’s third birthday and it looked like it had been concocted from beet juice.  My attempt to prepare a pink cake with pink frosting was an absolute disaster because I totally lost control of the red food coloring, and instead fed her young guests a poppy red cake with the same brilliant colored frosting.

As time went by, my expertise improved to some degree, and our oldest son’s cake was copied from one of the Pillsbury Baking Contest winners.   Every September ninth he requested the same three layer dark chocolate cake flavored with instant coffee and frosted with a bittersweet icing.  The rest of the family always groaned as his birthday cake appeared on the table.  Still he had it until he left the household, and to the best of my knowledge, his wife still makes it each year.

Our middle son loved angel food cake, and one of my friends with more culinary experience than I , suggested adding one fresh egg white to the boxed version.  She assured me it would be perfect, and she was right.  Topped with a simple chocolate glaze, it was fun to make and quickly became Jim’s favorite.

I never attempted to repeat the pink cake for our daughter, but in later years her birthday cake was a German Sweet Chocolate Bundt cake.  A friend had served it at her home, and Diane requested I repeat it for her birthday.  One of the secrets to this recipe was keeping the cake covered with a towel for one hour after removing it from the oven.  It was frosted with a milk chocolate ganache, and there were never any leftovers after her birthday dinner.

Our youngest son loved Madelines, and while we always had an ice cream cake from a local baker on the 4th of July for him, I a tried to have a plate of the lovely French butter cakes so revered by Marcel Proust in his ”Remembrance of Lost Times” on the table next to the cake.

As I put a stamp on the pink envelope and sent it on its way to Florida, I realized a birthday cake regardless of its many variations, always represents a sharing of joy and togetherness , and Ellen isn’t the only one in our family who appreciates them and the love they represent.