The best birthday cake ever

So, why am I still talking about (and eating!) birthday cake in July when my birthday was in May? Because my brother and I are Irish (and Italian!) twins, born just 13 months apart…and where there are birthdays, there must be cake!

Besides having our birthdays at the end of warm weather months, another thing we have in common is this: we both LOVE Italian Rum Cake, especially if it’s made by La Cascia’s Bakery in Burlington, MA. Alas, our respective family members do not. We therefore typically do not indulge ourselves with our favorite cake on our birthdays in the interest of the family as a whole. It’s not that much fun eating your birthday cake while the rest of the family (who really wanted ice cream cake/chocolate cake with vanilla frosting/yellow cake with chocolate frosting/chocolate cake with marshmallow frosting like his girlfriend’s mother used to make 25 years ago…) looks on, having no cake at all. Or worse, having a bite of your beloved Italian Rum Cake and barely making it to the kitchen barrel in time to spit it out, saying, “Eeeeeewwwwww! This cake is gross!”

The upside of this though is that we get to have our favorite birthday cake for breakfast every day until it’s gone. 🙂

If you are in the neighborhood and just stop by LaCascia’s for an Italian Rum Cake, they will usually have a few made up ahead of time, one of which you could take home. These have strawberries in the filling of pastry cream and chocolate pastry cream, frosted with buttercream; slivered almonds are arranged around the outside of it. This cake is very, very good.

If you have time to plan and order ahead, however, you can have your cake made the way you want it; you can have the birthday cake of (my brother’s and) my youth. The way we wanted it was with peaches and strawberries in the filling, and whipped cream frosting, hold the almonds. Not that we don’t like almonds, but our dad never wanted nuts on anything since he had a great deal of trouble eating them. This cake is amazingly excellent.

Enjoy!