The One Where I Rave About My Son's Birthday And Also Swear Way Too Much

The birthday thing was not entirely unexpected (oddly enough last year he turned one at this exact same time) yet still The Day seemed to creep up and take me by surprise, shouting loudly in my ears, stamping on my school shoes, and then running away, laughing meanly.

And so, plans were made for a party for Tricky and toddler pals. This in turn meant horrible night sweats for Mumma and waking in panic over THE BIRTHDAY CAKE.

CUE: LOUD STING OF ‘SPOOKY’ MUSIC

Last year, my sister in law N made the birthday cake and it was a triumph. The N does not stand for "Nigella" but frankly it may just as well. She used a Nigella Lawson recipe (as she does for all the birthday cakes for all her children) featuring the magical ingredient buttermilk which made it more robustly able to bear the weight of what appeared to be a tonne of bright red icing and several gazillion Smarties. This was then scoffed by everyone and in the case of the adult friends present, washed down with beakers of champagne.

It was, we all agreed, a simply marvelous party.

CUE: LOUD STING OF ‘CELEBRATION’ MUSIC

But that was a year ago and now my sister in law is gainfully employed and totally run off her feet and so if there was going to be home made Nigella Birthday Cake for Tricky the finger bun was pointing well and truly at me.

CUE: LOUD STING OF 'HILARITY' ENSUES' MUSIC

But see I don't make cakes.

Well I have made some extremely heavy fruit cakes, suitable for diabetics and people with MS who are not supposed to eat saturated fats, but certainly not things containing an entire stick of unsalted butter that must be creamed with half a sack of castor sugar.

I did toy briefly with the idea of buying a cake but the cloying chemical scent of a bought caramel mudcake which C purchased for my own birthday celebration (one of the three such events) was still lingering in my senses.

No, I told myself sternly. There is a well thumbed copy of The Domestic Goddess just waiting for me on the shelf downstairs. There are traditions in place, sacred rituals, and how rare is that in our secular, busy, just-buy-the-frigging-cake-mentality lives? And also, bearing in mind my current wrestles with Nietzsche, what would he say on the matter? Surely he would encourage me to climb that Nigella Cake Mountain?

And so, on the afternoon before The Day, I set aside my actual proper paid employment despite the fact that I am under the Deadline Hammer and had two murders, a mass drowning, an unhappy wife and a stalking barista to whip into submission ( that's right Nigella, try licking your pouty lips over that little recipe), placed All My Ingredients on the bench and took down Her Book.

Thence began The Muttering. I know about the muttering because my brother in law was working in the room next to the kitchen and he could hear me the whole time. Apparently it went like this:

Ok ok ok….plain flour, yes yes, big eggs, got them, vanilla extract, ha yes, castor sugar, butter milk, bi carb, bi carb, bi carb, baking pow......der. ...oh no...castor sugar, castor sugar...how much?...that's nowhere near enough....god! No No No!

Muttering briefly stops while I dash down to the corner stop for more castor sugar.

Muttering continues as above until I manage to compact the wussy beater thingys of the hand held mixer with hardened butter and sugar.

As the motor overheats I rush into brother in law’s room because, being married to N, he will surely have absorbed some cake-making wisdom via osmosis if not actual cooking practice. Luckily K has both and I learn that when one creams butter and sugar together one is aiming for a light fluffy cream like consistency, nothing like the greasy mess I am now waving about hysterically in the air.

At some point in the day C arrives home which is good as once the butter and sugar is properly creamed it has to be added to the sieved flour/baking powder mixture and alternating with the buttermilk/vanilla extract mixture and FOR FUCKS SAKE NIGELLA I ONLY HAVE TWO HANDS.

But finally, finally the cake is cooked and looks quite presentable.

Cut to next morning when C and I now have to do more butter/sugar madness to create delightful ‘butter icing’.

Except Nigella, whom I am beginning to hate, has thoughtfully not bothered to include the actual method of making butter icing in her book. She has the ingredients and some wonderfully charming anecdote about Barbie’s bosoms or somesuch but it seems that butter icing is like breathing or indeed breast feeding (ha bloody ha) and everyone is born knowing how to do it.

Eventually we do discover how to do it and yes it is easy but how much stress would we have avoided if she had just thoughtfully included these six simple words:

BEAT THE FUCK OUT OF IT.

And now we must put aside our cake making hat and put on our cake decorator floppy beret.

A word on birthday cake decoration and shape. The Naughty Nephews kindly took me through both versions of the Women’s Weekly Cake Decorating Book and pointed out all their fabulous birthday cakes of the past: the train, the rocket ship, the caterpillar, the Sydney Opera House, the great fucking wall of China (some slight exaggeration here).

Yea verily they are all brilliant but require much sculpting and shaping and scalpel precision type shaving of the very cake that one has already lost sleep over the making thereof. Also, it seems, one needs a shitload of coloured popcorn and chocolate biscuits to adhere to the sides.

So the shape I decided on was a T.

And simple though that shape may appear, even this required C and I to sit down with pieces of paper and ruler and scissors and tumbler of whiskey, cutting and recutting, sipping and resipping, just to create a template that would ensure the correct T shape.

The next decision to be made was colour.

Last year was red. This year….what?
We could go blue or green or take a cake out of Nigella’s tea tray and go white on white. (Except of course we wouldn’t because that’s just ridiculous) In the end I decided to follow on with a theme (ie the chakras) and go for orange. This means that while last year’s cake honoured the base chakra ie the genitals, this year’s moved up the ladder a bit and would honour the bowel.

In years to come we shall go through things like heart(green) and throat(blue) chakras and eventually hit the final third eye/top of the head chakra (one or t’other, I’m a bit sloppy with the boundaries). The obvious benefit of basing your child’s cake on chakras is that the first seven years’ colours are pre-determined, all the way up to… violet.

Just to cover my bases I had a few weeks back bought every possible variety of food colouring, sprinkle shapes(including stars, moons, dinosaurs, flowers and internal organs) roll out ready made icing, tubes of garish ‘write on’ icing, little candy animal faces, smarties and mini marshmallows.

C did the icing, based on his experience with plaster rendering (which he declared to be easier) and I did the decorating based on my impatience.

At last we were done. A proper birthday cake, made from a Nigella book, iced orange, studded with smarties and marshmallows and decorated with a plastic tiger.

We gazed at it with almost as much pride as we had first gazed at Tricky and I looked at the enormous amount of left over butter icing and felt a sudden surge of Nigella directed energy and then immediately whipped up my sleeves and DASHED OFF TWO DOZEN NIGELLA FAIRY CAKES.

I added extra colouring to the orange icing and ended up with a plate of lurid pink and camouflage green cupcakes. Sadly this is the only proof I have that they existed.

This story began as a stressful and worrying experience but ended happily with eight bottles of champagne and seven home delivered Turkish pides many hours later after the children had been put to bed.

And I realised that Nietzsche was right all along with the mountain and the suffering and what makes the most fulfilling experiences and the good things coming from bad. And he was almost right about alcohol being the scourge of civilization and how we should all just avoid it like the plague except miraculously, the next day, apart from a slight seediness, there was NO HANGOVER.

It was, simply, a marvelous party.

CUE: LOUD STING OF ‘VICTORY’ MUSIC

CUE: MUSIC DIRECTOR STRANGLED BY STALKING BARISTA