SEATTLE — I was making my own birthday cake. Why was this happening?! It was so very clearly wrong. One should never make one's own birthday cake; it should arrive by the magic that is love, floating through the air with candles glowing, accompanied by a song sung in one's honor. This was axiomatic. Also, it was hot — my birthday is in August — and the apartment was getting even hotter, despite all the windows thrown wide open, as the ancient Magic Chef electric stove cranked up.
All I wanted to do was go to the lake and fling myself in; this was my clearly stated birthday wish. Not only was this not happening, but the traditional celebratory dessert was clearly not going to materialize, either. Thus, I had begun making my own birthday cake in a spirit that would rightly be called spite-baking. This was a fine way to occupy my time ... fine. A part of me wanted more misery, to be sure: Baking a cake is the opposite of jumping in a lake, in August, especially. It was not the best of times in my life.
The cake was two layers, a chocolate situation. I had every confidence that the cake would be great. After a traumatic childhood baking experience with a Mad Hatter's Tea Cake from an "Alice in Wonderland" cookbook that I'd carried home from the library in a state of blissful innocence — the recipe proved complicated, calling for many eggs, and the cake emerged from the oven as an inedible low-lying sludge, having somehow anti-risen — I had eventually recovered, attaining with the dawn of adulthood a degree of baking competence. I could make my Aunt Edith's dinner rolls; I could make cakes; I found that I could even make pie crust and had deployed this skill several times in the service of quiche.
