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.

Labels:

Comments

  1. SandyMarch 17, 2013 at 9:03 AM

    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. Sarah JacobsMarch 17, 2013 at 10:08 AM

    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

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...
1 comment
Read more

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

 I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night.  I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1)  אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה  God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2)  אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר   May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3)  יָאֵר יְהֹ...
8 comments
Read more

A Passover loss

 My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of  linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin.  You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...
2 comments
Read more