Today is the final day of my birthday week cakewalk, because today is my birthday! To celebrate, I decided to go all out and get nine cakes instead of just one! Is that wrong? It’s okay, they’re minis! Mini cupcakes from The Cake Cottage in Wells!
These cupcakes are amazing. I haven’t eaten every one of them yet, but I’ve had enough of them to know that they are so worth eating.
The lemon is my favorite so far, but as I said, they are all delicious. If I could build my own, I would make a chocolate cupcake, strawberry frosting, and the green angel wing things from the lemon cupcake. 🙂
I hope I have inspired you to have your own birthday week cakewalk this year. I hope you had fun participating in mine! 🙂
Getting to the home stretch! Today’s cake was a present from my friend, Jane. Thanks for taking the pressure off with the cake-finding mission today, Jane!
Actually, I should have said today’s cakes, because Jane gifted me with a Cake Trifecta! Lemon, Chocolate Bomb, and Fruit Tart (because fruit is healthy!).
Oh, and the cakes came with a side of flowers.
What a treat this was!
All three of these cakes were delicious. All pass. Full disclosure: I didn’t eat all of them all! Only half! I swear!
Day 5! Today’s cake had to be great to make up for yesterday’s fail. I went to Mike’s Clamshack Fish Market. My friend Barney said, “It’s that time again already?!”
I bought cakes here for last year’s cakewalk too.
Anyway, I got the Lemon Blueberry Cake with Lemon Buttercream made by Something Different. This is a tried and true cake. No indecision or angst here.
I am further celebrating by eating it at the ocean! Sublime. This cake surely is a ‘pass’ on the pass/fail scale, and then some. I am taking a chance and posting third from my phone, so apologies if it’s not looking right. I’ll check it on the computer later.
Onward!
My family of origin had some family traditions, but they were few.
One that has made it to the present is the Italian Rum Cake birthday cake tradition. My brother’s birthday and mine are about a month apart. We both love Italian Rum Cakes. My family? His family? Um, not so much.
Okay, they hate it.
As much as I love this cake, it is not fun to have a birthday cake on my birthday that no one but me will eat.
Also, it’s damn hard to find this cake in Maine. Actually, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to find this cake in Maine.
So here’s what my brother and I do now:
We call La Cascia’s Bakery and order the Italian Rum Cake with Strawberries (included) and Peaches (cost extra-pay it! it’s worth it!). You get to choose between whipped cream and buttercream frosting (WHIPPED CREAM FROSTING ROCKS!). You must decide if you want nuts on the outside or not-I can never decide so I order nuts on half of it. 🙂
One of us picks up the cake and drives to the other’s house (we take turns hosting-this year is my brother’s turn).
We split the cake. Literally. We each eat half. In our defense, we order the smallest one (serves 8-10 people in real life) they make.
That’s it. Problem solved! We love the cake! Our relatives are not subjected to it! Plus it’s June (my birthday was in May) and I am still eating birthday cake!
I did find a recipe for it (without the strawberries and peaches) on the Mangia Bene Pasta website, but there are something like a thousand steps in this recipe, so it’s pretty certain that I will never make it. Ever. I’d be too tired to eat it after all that.
Italian Rum Cake with peaches and strawberries with whipped cream frostingThe 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.
my best work friend is moving on to greener pastures in the workforce…happy for her, sad for me. of course,we plan to stay in touch and have even gone so far as to devise ways to accomplish this (we don’t live near each other), but it is still happy/sad. In The Happiness Project (http://www.happiness-project.com/), author Gretchen Rubin talks about this feeling (she calls it ‘happy/unhappy’ in her book), when the thing that makes you happy also makes you unhappy…one of her examples is eating more than one cupcake…i can relate to that.
how to officially say goodbye? usually at my company we offer up a cake of some sort (although more often than not, my departing friend is the cake baker/procurer) and a gift certificate to a local business.
It’s okay, they’re minis! Mini cupcakes from The Cake Cottage in Wells!
Karen Creamer Author, Coach, Speaker 
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