Happy birthday to me!

A few days late. My birthday was last Thursday. I've always loved my birthday. Except for the complete tragedy of not being able to take cupcakes in to school on my birthday like my siblings and pretty much everyone else in the world without a summer birthday could (and to a seven year old me that was everyone). I'm over that now. Helps that kids can't really take treats in to school anymore.

This was my birthday cake. Um, may I oh-so-modestly say that this cake was DIVINE. I mean seriously fab. I eat a little sliver for breakfast for the next four days and it was just so, so good every time. It started life as the cake in Pollyanna, which is one of those movies I subject my kids to on rainy Sunday afternoons. Last time we saw it, I was reminded how wonderful the cake she eats in the bazaar scene looks. As a child, I always wanted it. And as an adult, I wanted it even more. The difference is as an adult in the digital age, I can Google. I can also bake (see husband's birthday post from a few days prior). So I set about making the Pollyanna cake. I Googled and found a site where someone loved the cake the way I did and had recreated it. I made the cake. All went well. But then I tasted the crumbs. They were pretty almondy (there's almond extract in the recipe on that site). Which tasted good, but not like it would work with chocolate. So I began to brainstorm. Strawberry, I suggested. No, lemon, Tom thought. We both stared at each other and around the room to see what we had for inspiration. Finally, on the back of my cake flour box was IT. I'd been admiring the pretty cake on there since I'd bought the cake flour. It was a raspberry vanilla layer cake. Yep, that's it.

I ran to the store for seedless raspberry jam (since all I had was grape jelly) and went to town. I sliced all my layers in half and filled and stacked and ended with a very tall cake. I stuck it in the freezer to set up before the final frosting. Oh, and in between all of this I was running the kids back and forth to swimmng lessons. Fun.

But the cake was perfect. Not quite the Pollyanna cake I started out wanting, but absolutely delicious nonetheless.