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Any celebration that revolves around loved ones and a cake ringed with fire is a serious contender in the “best day ever” awards. And what’s not to love about birthdays — either as the guest of honor, or simply a guest? There are presents and hugs, and it nary has the soul-crushing, brow-beaten, commercial-heavy trappings of other gift-centric holidays. And, chances are, the eating is glorious.
We asked around America’s Test Kitchen for some fun food-related birthday stories. Here are a sampling:
I’m not a cake person, and most of my friends know this. Usually I get a birthday pie, but one memorable year someone made me a birthday meatloaf with 22 candles!
For my birthday when I was about 12, my dad (who never knew what to buy for my sister and me, and always gave us cash in a card) unexpectedly brought home the biggest lobster I have ever seen. It probably weighed upwards of 20 pounds, 2½ feet long — no kidding. I still can’t imagine why I didn’t feel bad that we ate it. We probably should have donated it to the Aquarium. But it tasted great and we ate it all. (My mom and sister hated seafood. So it was kind of solidarity between dad and me that he got me the giant lobster.) I’ll never forget it.
In Mexico, after you sing and blow out the candles of the cake, everyone starts chanting Mordida (which means “bite”), trying to coax the birthday girl or boy to take a bite. More often than not, someone will come up behind them and push their face into the cake when they are taking a bite. While there are plenty of pictures and footage of my sisters, cousins, and I at a very early age crying with a face full of cake, we’ve turned it into more of a sport as we’ve gotten older. Often times you have to earn the trust of your victim acting as a protector before your inevitable betrayal. After much pleading and arguing the birthday person usually caves to the pressure of the crowd, and if you’re quick, you can come away with minimal cake on your face. Beware: If you outright refuse, frosting will find its way onto your face after the cake’s been sliced when you least expect it.
One year when I was young, my dad, brother and I decided to surprise my mom on we birthday by making her a layer cake from scratch. Should have known it’d be a disaster from the start, but we got up early that morning and got baking. Surprisingly, the cakes came out of the oven okay, but in an effort to get the final product ready before my mom woke up, we frosted and stacked the layers without letting them cool. The result: epic structural integrity fail. Mom came downstairs that morning to find a totally collapsed dessert and three dejected dudes in the kitchen… So, logically, we just ate the whole mess for breakfast. To this day, the legend of the “Earthquake Cake” lives on.
And now for the Silly Question of the Day…
What is your fondest food-related birthday story?
Leave your silly answer in the comments!
(Photo: Will Clayton)
About the Author: Christine Liu
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This birthday I indulged at Neptune Oyster with my family, no cake, but many oysters and lobster dishes with prosecco.
For my brother’s birthday, I decided to bake Chocoflan (aka “Pastel Imposible”). It’s this delicious Mexican chocolate cake that’s topped with flan. What makes it so amazing and “imposible” is that you pour the cake batter in the pan and top it with the flan mixture, but as it bakes, the layers flip! I had no idea how the cake would turn out when I flipped it out of the pan, my brother’s eyes just widened in amazement. He took one bite and was in chocolate cake-flan ecstasy! I was so happy he enjoyed the cake so much. It’s now his favorite cake!
Just last month, my wife planned a party in which she (and I, to a lesser extent) prepared a “Tastes of Philadelphia” meal for my birthday. The 4 courses took recipes from all of my favorite restaurants in the city. We started with homemade hummus from Michael Solomonov’s Zahav. Then for the entree we made spinach gnocchi (Vetri) and two types of grilled pizza (another Vetri restaurant – Osteria). Then to close the meal she really outdid herself with what is by far my favorite dessert in Philly – the salted caramel budino from Barbuzzo. And along the way we enjoyed plenty of beers from Philadelphia Brewing. It was by no means the easiest party to throw, but I’ll never forget it, and it reminded me why I love my wife and my city so much.
My husband and I made a 14 layer cake for my birthday last year! It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun too!
A few birthday’s ago, my husband surprised me with a scratch-made chocolate cake. When I came home, I could smell the alluring aroma of chocolate floating through the air. I was so excited because I knew he had baked me something! The closer I got to the kitchen, the more worried I was becoming. I could smell that sad smell of burnt chocolate. I was too afraid to ask if a disaster had occurred, so I just said, “smells like you’ve been cookin’!”. I could tell he was upset as he proceeded to tell me what went down in the kitchen. Apparently he followed the directions “exactly”, but due to our location at a high elevation (Cheyenne, WY), the cake decided to pour out over the pan and into the oven. I noticed a plate covered with a towel on the counter and asked if that was the salvaged cake. He said it was, but that he didn’t even want me to look at it. I let him know that I would love it despite the overflow, it’s still homemade chocolate cake! He removed the towel from the plate, and there it was, in all of the glory it could have, a one inch, crumbly mess with blobs of gooey chocolate icing strategically placed to make it looked like a two-layer cake as he had originally intended. Of course I know you can’t judge a book by its cover, so I gladly dug in and enjoyed the special treat my husband so lovingly made for me. He couldn’t believe that I was eating, and enjoying the cake, but I made him taste it, and he ended up being pretty proud of his accomplishment!
It wasn’t my birthday but for my Mom’s last birthday I made her a spice cake from my America’s Test Kitchen cookbook and it was so good and different from what we normally did for birthdays. I can’t wait for my dad’s birthday so I can a new fun cake!
When I was young my Mom made a chocolate cake using the Wilton Batman/Superman cake pan, complete with the full icing. It was just a simple chocolate cake, but the full icing job and eating a superhero cake was a big hightlight and just made my younger birthdays special.
i almost always requested ice cream cake for my birthdays, and one year my sweet mom carefully crafted a mint chip one which i’ll never forget.
When we were kids, my mom used to rent Wilton pans in the shape of whatever cartoon character we were into at the time. Eventually, though, we realized that no one in the family actually liked cake all that much, so we switched to pies, cheesecakes, etc. Much yummier than purple buttercream!
This year my son had a Super Hero Training Camp Party that was superbly awesome for him…killer for me! I made cupcakes from my Test Kitchen video and but instead of making them like the standard hostess design I fashioned them to look like spider man. My 3 year old was so happy when they came out he didn’t want any one to eat any. The birthday video is hilarious, I can’t wait to show him when he grows up!
At my last job, my boss who is also my close-aged girl friend gave me a S’Mores kit/tin one year for my birthday, she couldn’t believe I’ve never had S’Mores before! Even though it wasn’t the real campfire deal, I had so much fun digging inside the tin and microwaving all the ingredients to make quick S’Mores! I shared the treats with everyone at work, it made me so popular that the next day my co-workers sent me Lilys, the flowers of my name, as a thank you! It was the best birthday ever!
The year I turned 12, which was quite a while ago, we had a huge ice storm. My father, who does tree work for a living, got a huge tree job for a wealthy man in the area. My dad’s job was to clean up the ice-damaged oak trees, by removing the whole tree when necessary or more often than not trimming. It was something like 30 or 40 trees he worked on. Needless to say, there was a lot of twiggy debris and my dad created a huge burn pile.
As my birthday approached, my dad decided that we would cook a large (40 poundish) hunk o beef. He made a gallon of sauce and slathered it on the beef which he wrapped in an old bed sheet. He covered the bed sheet with wet burlap.
Then he dug a hole in the smoldering coals. After lining the hole with a bunch of wet leaves, he put the beef in the pit, covered with more wet leaves, hot coals and left it to cook for 12 (or 18) hours. I remember that the butcher had said it would take about twice as long, but we pulled it out to check and it was fall of the bone tender, dripping with succulunt juices. We loaded our BBQ into the car and headed off to a park for a picnic. Fantastic!
My favorite birthday food memory, hmmm… I’ve too done many campfires and bbq’s for my birthday being that it’s smack in the middle of July. However, my best birthday meal involves warm, melted cheese, hot oil, and lots of fresh veggies and meats. Yes, Fondue. That throwback to days of old, I actually love it! One of the only meals my hubby and I can have that we both walk away completely satiated.
When I turned three, my mom stayed up into the wee-hours baking a “doll cake” where the cake acts as the well appointed dress of a very special and real barbie doll. When I was presented the cake I looked with horror and exclaimed to my family, “What’s that doll doing in my cake!”
This has become quite a teasing point for me at holiday and I still take birthday cake seriously all these birthdays later.
I absolutely love the tradition for my birthday. I always have chicken fried steak (my husband made an awesome version last year) and my mom makes me a german chocolate cake. Yes, I am a grown woman who’s mom still makes her a birthday cake every year. There are a few memories from my childhood though that stick out. My brother and I always tried to do something special, but we were so young, things never quite turned out. One year we made a heart shaped rice krispie treat but were out of rice krispies, so we used cheerios (that one wasn’t half bad). Another year we tried making a cake with 7-minute frosting, which was just a gooey mess. Then there was my claim to fame…for some reason I decided to make peanut butter cookies for my mom, but because she hates peanut butter, I left it out. The cookie “dough” was so liquidy, they ran all over the pan, so instead of coming home to fresh baked cookies, my mom came home to a destroyed kitchen and oven.
my birthday is sometimes on thanksgiving. when my mom remarried (when i was 13), we started going to my step-grandma’s house for thanksgiving. when i turned 15, my birthday landed on thanksgiving. it was about time for dessert, and my mom and step-dad brought out a big pink box and laid it on the table in front of me. i opened it and it was a big old turkey cake! it was airbrushed to look like a cooked chicken, complete with little cake stuffing coming out of it. underneath the frosting it was german chocolate, my favorite! it was probably the best turkey i’ve ever tasted!!
When I was a very young girl my mom made me one of those birthday cakes with a real Barbie where her skirt is the actual cake. Oh I loved that cake!
Later, when I was in college my younger sister took a cake decorating class and baked and decorated a birthday cake for me. She worked very hard on it and it was beautiful. That meant the world to me and is a great memory.
sharonjo at gwtc dot net
My mom used to let us pick what kinf of cake we wanted for our birthday and how it should look. When I was six or seven I asked to have an Apple Tree on my cake. My grandparents had an apple tree and I loved playing in it and eating the apples, so I wanted one on my cake. My mom told me a few weeks ago that the lady looked at her like she was crazy when she ordered the cake. They asked if she wanted anything else on the cake and she said nope just and apple tree. shuttermom77atgmaildotcom
Can’t every day be our birthday? Thanks for the all the stories, from touching to hilarious. Congrats to this week’s random winner, punkrockmartha, whose awesome mother puts an extra-special spin on ice cream cake. Everyone, be sure to check out our newest giveaways at http://americastestkitchenfeed.com/topics/giveaway/