Birthday Baking

Every year I bake something for myself on my birthday. It’s a pair of things my mother accidentally taught me.

While for much of my life my mother did not like to talk about her own birthday, she loved to celebrate mine, my sister’s, her grandchildren’s, all were cause for her to bake a cake, or some other marker, to share with our friends. But my mother never ate those cakes: she was allergic to wheat.

She baked a lot at other times as well: wedding cakes for family and friends, pies and cheese cakes for holidays, mountains of cookies for the annual Christmas open house, and snacks for her students just because they might need a pick me up. Through all that baking, mom taught me that baking was something you did for other people. It wasn’t her intention, but it was what I learned. One of my first memories of baking myself was making an Angel Food Cake for my grandfather.

And so I only bake for myself once a year: to celebrate my birthday. This year’s cake was adapted from one in The Great British Baking Show: Love to Bake (which needs adaption as it’s written for a British audience and so has different flour, sugar, measurements, and nomenclature from US-centric cookbooks.)

I’ll get back to my series on writing for developers and technical consultants soon. But the next couple of pieces are still coming together. Sometimes editing take awhile.