Birthday Cake Tradition

As you all may know (from last year's birthday post), my wonderful husband and I have created a tradition that involves the one and only time each year that I allow him to step foot in my kitchen. I like to call it the Birthday Cake Bake-Off. I choose a recipe, I buy the ingredients and he creates a masterpiece. Years past have included Angel Food (from scratch of course, involving a dozen beaten egg whites...), German Chocolate and Red Velvet. While I narrowed my choice down to 5 options, I had to go with what sounded the best and I was in the mood for strawberries! So, Strawberry Angel Cake was the winner this year in every sense of the word. My only requirement was that he make the cake from scratch (the recipe, included as a link within the text, calls for a purchased Angel Food Cake.) Because, if you've ever tasted the difference, you know that nothing compares to Angel Food made from scratch.

He took the day off from work, made me a wonderful breakfast, chatted over coffee, went shopping with me and the kids, worked with Brendan on the wonderful cake, went on a family bike ride, then hired a sitter and took me out to dinner. We spent an amazing evening over dinner and coffee then returned to enjoy the cake. And every bite I took reminded me how blessed these first 30 years of my life have been. I couldn't have asked for a better birthday.

But while I appreciated the efforts of the magnificent cake-off... his presence in the kitchen never fails to produce crazy outcomes. An adverse result to not "supervising" the process??? He uses the salt from the salt shaker, fails to put the lid back on completely, and I pour half a shaker of salt onto my much looked forward to Chicken Parmigiana the next night... fortunately for both of us, we laughed it off but he'll never live it down :)