Birthday

A few years ago when I spent a summer living in Williamstown, I made a birthday cake that became known as 'cake in a bowl.' I had baked a Magnolia Bakery yellow cake and tried to stack the layers before the cake was fully cooled.  Then I stacked them the wrong way -- flat over round.  As my friend Becky arrived, I was bent over the cake holding the top layer with both hands, as if putting a ring around it, to stop the plate tectonics slide of splintered sections off the slick of warm icing below.  

I had made a double-batch of icing.  And I owned a large ceramic salad bowl.  So we made the cake into a giant parfait, essentially submerged in icing in a bowl.  Needless to say, it was delicious, if not awfully pretty.  Becky is trained as a pastry chef, so this was a bit like asking a master builder to help you pitch a broken tent.

This year, the lovely Mo offered to help me bake a cake.  Mo is Southern and moves around the kitchen like the modern version of my Southern grandmother, always in motion, never appearing to work, making stuff happen, then constantly tidying to make the work vanish and food appear.  In the middle of this, Mo tasked me with greasing the pans.  We used Crisco instead of butter and I didn't use a lot.  Mo went to turn the pans over and out fell the middle of the cake.  Then the chocolate glaze was coffee flavored and got transformed into a buttercream.  (If you've ever tried to make a glaze into a buttercream, then you know that, four boxes of powdered sugar later, you have about a gallon of icing and the ire of dentists everywhere.)

We tried to fix the landslide erosion situation by applying a pancake-makeup quantity of icing and immediately putting the cake in the fridge to set before a section fell off.  Mo's boyfriend Sean was the first other person who saw it, by which time some of the icing had started to droop giving the cake the jowly face of Jabba the Hut.  Sean winced instinctively (and kindly couriered the cake to the party the next day).  I love that cake the way you love an ugly baby.  And it made me laugh.  Here is Mo with it before it set in the fridge:

I spent my birthday more generally on the patio of the Maritime and at dinner at Cacio e Pepe, a lovely Italian in the East Village.  (For example, when I told David that is where we were going, he said without joking that we had a 10% chance of running into his Roman friend Mario by chance, since it was one of Mario's favorites in the city.)  


Summer birthdays are wonderful but many people are also out of town.  I was so worried literally no one would come to afternoon drinks after the volume of regrets I received that I asked my sister to come hang out at the beginning, even though she had a conflict between then and dinner.  Sweet Stacey brought beautiful sunflowers and, of course, herself.

Drinks started at 4 and at 4.05 Greg of Greg and Julie appeared.  Julie appeared ten minutes later.  I don't seem to have their picture.  Also present were Carina and James.  Carina is someone I have been trying to track down for about five years.  She hired me into my first job as a MoMA intern.  Then she became Rob Storr's assistant.  Then I didn't know what happened.  I even once asked Rob Storr after a panel -- weirdly in line to speak to him between two collectors -- if he had her email address.  There must have been a limitation to my research because it turns out she is first.last@google.  She wrote me on facebook out of the blue and I was ecstatic.  

Carina had been very involved in negotiations last time MoMA curators went on strike.  Rumors she had become a lawyer or started making baby clothes--both in circulation--proved untrue.  She had been working in the arts outside of New York.  Here she is with her husband James, an artist:

David appeared toward the end and walked over with me to dinner in the east village.  Cacio e Pepe were lovely hosts and even shaved down the stems of the sunflowers so they would fit in carafes as vases:

Here are some pictures from dinner, courtesy of Stacey.  From the left, Bader, me, Mo, Sean:

Amee and Michael, who have since become new parents of Max:

Michael and me:

Amee and me. . . 

The sorellas, sunflowers in evidence:

Stacey's lovely husband Paul:

The whole group, including down the left side Mackinnon, Veronica, David, Paul, Adrian:

Cacio e Pepe is named for this dish, spaghetti served in the rind of the cheese with lots of nearly whole black peppercorns:

Amee being served:

And then it was time for dessert. . . and the cake.  I hesitate to put a series of pictures of myself on my own blog, but take this as a snapshot film of how much pleasure I got out of the cake:

And, brace yourself for it, the cake itself:

Finally, as transformed by the loving Cacio e Pepe staff:

It was, needless to say, absolutely delicious.  The co-chefs:

I later showed Mark of the Egg project the original photo of the cake as it first set into its Jabba face in the fridge.  His immediate response, "That looks like meat."