It was my birthday earlier this week and so naturally I’ve been thinking a lot about cake and ice cream.
Last year, I told my children that I really wanted something as close as possible to the cones I used to get from the “Mr Whippy” van that came along our road. So we drove to Mcdonald’s for a McFlurry but they didn’t have any which caused my daughter to feel bad for me and worry that it had ruined my day.
It hadn’t, although I did wonder what it was about soft ice cream that held so much fascination.
It’s cake too that takes on a significance it’s hard to overstate on my birthday.
This year my daughter made me an excellent carrot cake which I have managed to keep away from the rest of the family for the most part.
My childhood memories of birthdays consist mostly of cake and tantrums both seemingly inevitable yet unrelated.
My mother was a wonderful baker and an even better decorator of cakes, masterful with an icing bag, fondant and her own hand crystalised flowers that would adorn any and every cake made for each special occasion.
She had a particular liking for rose-flavoured icing that she went on to use when my own children were small.
To this day my son would feel cheated if I were not to add some small amount of rose icing to his birthday cake as a nod to his late grandmother and to give both of us a taste of Turkish Delight reminding me of watching “Z Cars” with my sister in the 1970s and him a memory of his Nanna.
I have a pictorial record of every birthday cake made for my children and I am sure I will still be making them even when I can no longer guarantee to see them on their birthdays.
There was the Chocolate Oreo cheesecake one that I made for my son’s 18th that I have never been able to replicate despite its huge popularity or the year I tried to create representations of the children out of fondant icing kayaking and dancing respectively. Both renditions created much amusement but not in response to any likeness I had managed to realise.
Branching out from my own family there was the cake I made for my school friend Adam when he reached 50 that Martin decorated by painstakingly painting the cover of “Black Sabbath Volume 4” onto its icing the way he used to paint album covers onto people’s jackets back in the 1980s.
As an aside, the cake beneath Martin’s spectacular art was terrible. Dry and flavourless it was perhaps the best reminder of all that the cake is not about the cake but something much deeper and more meaningful altogether.
That was it of course. That was the reason I had been so set on having soft ice cream on my birthday like the ones from the van in my childhood.
So often have I talked to my clients about the importance of taking their own “inner child” out for ice cream, becoming their best friend and protector of themselves, and demonstrating a love that, once established, cannot be destroyed.
For once, I was taking my own advice.
Returning home from a long walk with the dogs on my birthday we go via McDonald’s to find that this year they do have McFlurry’s.
I bought one and I enjoyed it, just like I did all those years ago and it felt like a real privilege to be getting old.
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