“And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days…”
―
Birthdays. How in the world do you celebrate important days during a pandemic?
With a cake!
However it happens–store-bought or homemade, left on the front porch or served at a respectable social distance–the birthday cake is non-negotiable.
Trust me on this. Birthday cakes have been central to celebrations for a very long time
The Greeks, Egyptians and Romans all celebrated important events with a celebratory cake.
The Greek story is particularly interesting. Their cakes were moon-shaped to celebrate the birth date of Artemis, the goddess of the moon. Each cake was decorated with candles to glow like the moon. How cool is that? I’ll never think about candles on a birthday cake the same way again.
Our modern birthday cake tradition, though, appears to be more closely tied to 18th Century Germany where children’s birthdays were celebrated with cakes, candles and secret wishes. The celebration was called Kinderfest. A child’s cake bore one candle for each year of the child’s life and one extra candle, a candle of life, to celebrate the hope that the child would enjoy another year of life until the next birthday. The candles on the cake were lit at sunrise and it was the task of the family to keep them lit throughout the day until the evening celebration. (I’m thinking there must have been a whole lot of wax on that cake by the end of the day, but never mind.)
Here is a birthday cake I made for my good friend and neighbor Norma. Happy, happy day, Norma.
Here’s the recipe.
[mpprecipe-recipe:236]
This cake recipe is adapted from one that appears on the King Arthur Flour site KAF Birthday Cake.
