Ulli x Kahina Giving Beauty Candle
A friend of mine once stopped by without warning, and entered my house only to point at the candle I had burning on my desk. "You," she said, "are the only person I know who actually lights candles when you're just sitting at home by yourself."
That cannot be true. ...Doesn't everybody keep candles lit at all times?
This cake was, shall we say, a freewheeling design. I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do for my son's annual Halloween-themed birthday party - an all-black cake (inside and out) with bugs somehow involved (because eight-year-old boys, et cetera), and I thought maybe it'd be cool to have the bugs sort of coming out of the cake as if they'd been inside, but when I got to the part where I'd actually do that, I was stumped.
I wanted a crack in the cake of some sort, but didn't want it to look like, you know...a mistake.
And then I remembered the geode cake. It's all over Pinterest these days, and I've been dying to try one, and you know what geodes have?! CRACKS. (Sort of; you know what I mean.)
I want to be humble about this one, but it took me five hours, so I'm not going to be. (Granted, the creation process might have been slowed down ever-so-slightly by the fact that I was catching up on the 2-part season finale of The Bachelorette while fondant-ing, but STILL.)
So. To recap, the make-an-impossibly-fancy-birthday-cake-for-my-child tradition started with the Mermaid Cake (a process that began with my friend Alisa taking pity on me and teaching me how to make a cake that did not turn out like this).
Then came the Spooky Ghost Cake, the Moana Cake, the Bloodshot Eyeball Cake, and the Tie-Dye Rainbow Cake. This year my daughter suggested a "Moana Rainbow Unicorn Mermaid Cake," but I gently steered her in the direction of something a) new, and b) not that, because the chances of me executing that extremely specific vision were zero, and?
OK, so I know I literally just - like, just - wrote about how I'm *over* entertaining. But one of the great joys in my life these past few years has been going all-in with the kids' birthday parties. Last year we moved to LA only a couple of weeks before my son's birthday, so I gave myself a pass with that one...but my daughter is about to turn five and all the girl wants in life is a ridiculously cool birthday cake.
And so a ridiculously cool birthday cake is what she's (hopefully) going to get.
A ridiculously cool birthday cake, however, requires a theme. So far we've done mermaids, Moana, and rainbows, all of which my daughter suggested doing again...but come on. This is an OPPORTUNITY.
I’ve been writing recently about how my attitude towards entertaining has chilled out in the extreme these past few months. I’m sure I still have a fancy hors d’oeuvre recipe or two in me, but what I’ve discovered since removing virtually all of the fuss from my get-togethers with friends and neighbors is that that’s all it is: fuss. The point is to be with each other, and - especially when lots and lots of young children are involved - the easier we can make it to do that, the more we…do it.
Take the other night, for example: My neighbor Margo spontaneously invited us over to swim. I hesitated for a moment, because it was 4:30 PM, so not quite dinnertime, but also right in that sweet spot where I’d have to start making dinner soon or risk the kids being awake into the hour when Mom really needs to commence the bath-taking and watching of Handmaid’s Tale, which is - let’s be honest - unacceptable.
