Birthday Cake for the High Maintenance Person, Part 1

Shortly after my daughter was born, I took to wrapping her onto me in a Snugli front carrier so that I could move around and get some basic household tasks done. As basic as brushing my teeth for example, or laundering her tiny garments. There would be no bouncy seats or soft sided playpens for her, safe places from which she could watch me go about my business or examine some brightly colored toy or mobile. Emma was a crier, with what was acknowledged by us and her pediatrician as an acute case of colic, and she did better held close, swaddled in the Snugli or burrito-like in a receiving blanket.

For nine months she was known around the house as the Princess of Wails. We had to make a joke about the crying. It was either that or slip steadily into sleep deprivation madness.

At the time of her birth in March of 1988 we lived in Chicago, near Wrigley Field, in a small apartment in a fairly large, old apartment building that wrapped around a corner of two city streets. Emma began crying not long after we brought her home from the hospital. She cried through April and May, and continued to cry though a summer that was one of the hottest on record, with something like seven days at or over 100 degrees. When it wasn’t 100, it was 95 or so – no great relief – and I spent the days without air-conditioning and with an inconsolable child strapped to my chest. She spent her days pressed to me.

On the days when lack of sleep rendered me weepy too, I spent a lot of the day thinking “why me?” I was a first time mom, but I wasn’t a nervous new mom, hadn’t entered motherhood without experience. Neighbors had trusted me to watch their newborns, infants, and toddlers since I was 12 years old, after all. I kind of knew what I was doing. Or so I thought. No one knows what they are doing when they are sleep deprived, and hairline cracks in the calm and confidence reveal themselves, become fissures. And so, in between the buckling up of the Snugli and running a brush over my teeth or a comb through my hair, I was on the phone a lot to my older sister, my wet cheek resting on the baby’s hot, damp head, listening to my sister telling me that it would all be okay, someday. And soon, she hoped.

If nine months can be considered soon, then yes, Emma soon improved. Once she could stand and engage with the world upright, life got better. When she walked for the first time at ten months, better still. By the age of 2 1/2, she lit on the ideal method for calming herself: reading. Once she could read at that tender age, she found the way to inner quiet.

To this day, though, when not reading or lost in the online worlds of live journals and fan fiction and writing groups, Emma still makes her way through the world with emotions blazing. She is rarely at peace without her books, rarely simply happy, sad, angry, discouraged. She is happier, sadder, angrier and more outraged by injustices. She lives her life with raw nerves and it’s not an easy space to occupy. Some days, I wish I still had the Snugli.

It might make sense that a high maintenance person gets a low maintenance cake – the bakery cake, the cake mix cake, the Carvel cake. If energies are focused elsewhere, cake shortcuts should certainly be understood and forgiven. But taking those extra steps tells the birthday girl she isn’t just a series of problems waiting to be solved; she’s also a valued member of a family that is willing to embrace the rough along with the smooth. Making a fuss with cake often communicates more than a few well-placed words of encouragement ever could. Words are words, but cake is all heartfelt gesture.

So this year, for Emma, the most rococo cake of them all: the Italian Rum Cake, complete with rum syrup-soaked cake layers, fillings of vanilla and chocolate pasticceria (pastry cream), rosettes of whipped cream, and cherry sauce on the side.

Today, here’s the cake itself, a light but buttery cake layer that Judy Rosenberg of Rosie’s Bakery calls in her 1991 cookbook the Desert Island Butter Cake, her pick for the one cake she’d want with her while stranded on a desert isle. This is a super simple cake to make, and one whose simplicity of butter flavor melds nicely with the rum. The recipe makes one 9-inch layer; if you want two layers, make two separate cakes rather than doubling the recipe to divide between two pans.

I hope you’ll return on the weekend to see the fillings made and the cake assembled.

Desert Island Butter Cake

(adapted from Rosie’s All-Butter Fresh Cream Sugar-Packed Baking Book)

• 2 sticks unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
• 3 large eggs, at room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup sifted all-purpose flour

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 9-inch cake pan (alternately spray it with non-stick spray) and line the bottom with a 9-inch parchment circle. Don’t omit this step.

Melt the butter and set aside to let it cool a bit.

Beat the eggs and sugar in a mixing bowl using a hand held mixer on high speed.

Beat until the mixture gets very fluffy, thick, and pale in color, about 4 minutes.

Resift the flour into the egg-sugar mixture.

Using a rubber scraper, begin to fold the flour into the mixture. When the flour is almost but not completely incorporated, slowly fold in the butter as well. Blend gently with the rubber scraper only until you see no more streaks of butter or flour.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake in the center of the preheated oven for 30 – 35 minutes, or until the cake is uniformly golden brown and a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean. As the cake cools, the center will drop slightly below the edges of the cake. This is normal.

Let cool in the pan for 20 minutes before inverting the layer onto a cooling rack. Cool layer completely before assembling.

As a single layer, the cake is nice served with berries and cream for a quick and easy dessert. Or make two layers, and fill, frost, and decorate as you wish.

©2011 Jane A. Ward

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