Skip to main content

Happy Birthday to my youngest !!!!

I suppose that if I had actually given a bit more thought to it I wouldn’t have given birth to a son whose birthday so often falls just before Passover.

SAM_0280

 

What I really ought to be doing tonight is Passover cleaning. Instead I baked a cake for my youngest.  Some of his friends are coming by tomorrow afternoon.  I assume that a group of adolescents will polish off the cake.

 

What did I bake for my delightful but inconveniently born son?  The cake itself is a “quick plain cake”  from the settlement cookbook. Given my son’s very un-exotic taste in food the vanilla butter cake with a hint of orange flavor is just right.

 

The cake is filled with vanilla custard ice cream I made tonight. The frosting is a cooked butter cream that actually tastes delicious.

 

SAM_0281

 

The frosting is green because my son was born on St. Patrick's day.  The cake is covered in plastic wrap because I pulled the cake out of the freezer to take the photos.  At the moment it reminds me of the plastic slip covers that were so popular during my childhood.

SAM_0282

 

Here are the recipes for both the cake and the frosting.  I baked quick plain cake #1. Most of my kids’ cakes have been this cake with variations in flavor.

 

The frosting comes from a 1960’s book on decorated cakes.  The cakes are mostly ugly, but this butter cream recipe is delicious as stated, and was worth the price of the book.

My mixer died in the preparation of this cake.  I had to whisk the frosting by hand. I will get a new mixer after Passover.

buttercream 001

quick plain cake 001

 

I like how completely homey and home made this cake looks. The birthday boy dutifully licked all of the bowls and beaters.

Comments

  1. So, one born on Halloween and one born on St. Patrick's day! Cool. Does the other son have his own day?
    The cake looks good.
    Sandy

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sort of...my other son's birthday often falls during Passover. My mother used to celebrate his birthday during the second night of Passover. I have taken to making him cheesecake when his birthday falls during Passover.


    My birthday is often on Mothers' Day.
    \
    My kids like that their birthdays fall on such silly secular holidays. That is the celebration of their birthday holidays are pretty silly in this country.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

  וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים   You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for  giving life to all.  I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of  Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or  the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee.  If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it.    My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid.  I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed.   A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee  and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

Food friday - your grandmother's food processor

My grandmother bought my mother this wooden bowl and a chopping knife, known in Yiddish as a hock-messer, soon after my parents got married. Yes, she also got them a dairy set as well. these wooden bowls and chopping knives were a big part of food prep when I was growing up. meatloaf and meat balls were mixed in this bowl. Chopped liver was made in this bowl as well. Sundays we often made chicken salad for lunch made out of chicken left over from Shabbat chopped with vegetables and mayo. That too, was made in this bowl. When I was in college my parents got their first food processor and the chopping bowls were not used as much. Several years ago, my father asked if i would like the bowls and the hock-messers. I was happy to have them. I like the sheer physicality of chopping up a big bowl of stuff into teeny pieces. While the wooden bowls have stood up well to the years of use, the hock-messers had not. The bladed which were bolted into their handles, wobbled. The blades wouldn't ...