Happy Birthday To Me

Sometimes my birthday brings such excitement, sometimes longing. When I was a kid, there were only two birthday cake choices at our house -- chocolate cake with white icing or white cake with chocolate icing. I always thought the former was more interesting, and I remember once asking my mother why there was no chocolate-on-chocolate option. She replied "too much chocolate". My mother has never baked a cake from scratch, and really why would anybody who lived in the land of German, Italian and Jewish bakeries we'll call Bergen County, New Jersey? Some of my fondest childhood memories involve standing on a sidewalk on Sunday after church, waiting on line to get into a bakery.

Oddly enough, my little British grandmother baked cakes, beautiful and interesting ones that she sent home with my father every once in a while. I say oddly because she lived in the Bronx in Parkchester, at 5 Metropolitan Oval, and I still find it fascinating that although she lived in an apartment she managed to make pickled onions and plum jelly. Where on earth did she even get canning jars?

Her son, my father, has long had a family nickname: "Vincent Cake Murphy", and I suppose it is from him that I get my love of cake. He would come home from a bakery, either one in the city where he worked or one in Tenafly or Hackensack, with a chocolate cake that housed layers of whipped cream and fresh sliced fruit: strawberries, blueberries, bananas. My mother pronounced them "gloppy" and our extended-family Sunday dinners always included pastry-like cakes for those family members who didn't share my father's love of what I'll call "real cake". Yes, I know this post makes my mother sound harsh; she's not: she just doesn't like cake.

This year, for the first time, my birthday has come at the wrong time in my life. As I see it, a choice must be made. Wallow, wallow, wallow as I face the fears associated with the knowledge that my latest back attack has done some real psychic, not to mention vertebral, damage: that I lost my way once again for awhile. Or, stop and steady myself as best I can. I choose the latter, and to close the deal I'm going to the kitchen right now to bake myself a cake. I don't know if I own any cake pans, but there's gotta be some kind of vessel I can use. Why not just go to the store? Well, if I did that I'd just buy a cake, not the point.

I haven't made a cake in a long time, so wish me luck.