Bloganuary #28

Describe your perfect birthday cake.

I really don’t know how to answer this “prompt” – I can’t remember the last time I had a “birthday cake”! Generally, I prefer starters & savoury foods to sweets and puddings. So that has answered my question in a way: My ideal birthday cake would not be too sweet and as I love fruit, I would like more fruit/less cake.

I do love chocolate too, but have found that the easiest way to wean myself off ‘bad habits’ like biting my nails, eating too much chocolate and reducing my consumption of sugar in tea is simply just to stop.

For example, whilst I was taking very powerful medications to dampen down my immune system I was reminded of an experiment we did at school where we cut a fingernail and left it on an agar plate – after a week we took a look at all the agar plates which had been sealed and there was quite horrible brightly coloured bacteria that had grown around the fingernail. Therefore I figured that biting away at my fingernails, which I had always done since I was a child, was not a good thing to do with a compromised immune system. As soon as I started taking the medication – I just stopped biting my fingernails (at age 30). Similarly, I used to take sugar in my tea and when I wanted to stop that’s exactly what I did – STOP. No gradual cutting down.

However, I do buy birthday cakes for other people (hence the photo above) which was a birthday cake destined to go to my partner’s sister for her birthday. It never made it! We rushed out of the house made sure that her present was in the car and it was only when we were about 20 miles along the motorway that I turned to my partner and said “you did remember the cake didn’t you!” Anyway it was to late to turn round as we had a long drive ahead of us and so the cake just remained in its box on the side in our kitchen. As I was due to go to the gym at our local Therapy Centre the following Monday, we decided that we would donated to the physiotherapists at the gym. (Note. We didn’t eat it). The following week, after my exercises I just mentioned “how was the cake?” to be met with profuse apologies for not having thanked me for it and gushing comments about how lovely it had been and how the icing was not too sweet at all even the flowers!

The preceding year I had actually contacted a specialist cake shop and asked whether they could produce a cake for my partners sister’s birthday, but not too sweet so could they keep the icing as thin as possible and instead of iced flowers please could they use artificial, silk flowers instead. See the result below:

The silk flowers were much appreciated and my cover photo is how his sister presented them in a bowl to retain.