Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Birthday Cake

Posted November 16, 2009
Find more about cake , buttermilk , dalai mama , birthday cake
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The sleepover party cake from Ben's 9th. The bodies are actually Twinkies (I know!) and I rolled the blanket from tinted marzipan. This is from the FamilyFun Birthday Cake book, natch.

Birdy demanded this cake for her 3rd: "A strawberry strawberry cake with strawberries." To her own party she wore a paper-bag on her head. And Curious George undies, sans pants.

Also from the cake book. Ben arranged all the hunky swimming figurines himself. We called this cake "Pool Party on Castro Street."

Flower Garden Cake. Also from THE BOOK. Candy is so useful, you know?

The Luau Cake from Ben's 8th. Are you waiting to see if there's the Hot Tub at Playboy Mansion cake? Maybe next year!

Frog cupcakes for school birthday snack. These, and every other cake shown here, are all made with the buttermilk batter, regardless of the suggestions in the book.

Butterfly from Birdy's 5th.

And this, from her 6th. She made this up: she wanted a cake that looked like a pasture where she could arrange her Playmobil kids with their farm animals. We made a fence from wafer cookies and grass from tinted coconut. Birdy was moderately concerned that the children would eat her Playmobils.

Starting around ten or eleven months before their birthdays, my children begin planning their cakes. This means long afternoons spent with this book and a pad of post-it notes. And it's not wholly dissimilar to "the picking game," which they play with toy catalogues, each person deciding longingly what they would get on every page if they could get anything they wanted (I actually recently said to Birdy, who has picked from the same American Girl catalogue so many times that she knows it literally by heart and the pages are literally disintegrating, "Honey, are you going crazy with that thing? Should I take it from you?" And she said, "No. I mean no, you shouldn't take it from me. But yes, I am going crazy." And then she returned to her automated zombified pronouncements: "Bitty Twins Starter Set complete with Bitty Grooming Accessories. Coconut Dog with Happy Pet Carrier Case." Poor Birdy.). Picking out a birthday cake from THE BOOK has an element of fantasy to it, and also an element of porn, what with the drooling, open-mouthed ogling of page after page of glossy, candy-hued cake photographs.

And sometimes--and I say this carefully because, as you know, FamilyFun magazine is my favorite magazine and also my family's bread and butter--I am filled with dread. "Don't," I think, looking at them looking at the multi-car choo-choo cake complete with candy-filled caboose and steaming steam engine and licorice-whip detailing. "Please no." And the post-it note is peeled off and placed on the page and I think a silent, "No no no." (By the way, I have seen that cake at a number of birthday parties and it is super-cool. You should not be dissuaded by my lazybones angst.) "That's nice," I suggest, looking at a ladybug that appears to be a pretty straightforward frosting job. "Or--ooooh--that one!" about some simple polka-dotted layers. But they linger over pirate ship and luau. They bookmark princess cake and sleepover cake and treasure chest and sand castle. And I'm getting off easy, I know, because one year Ben decided he wanted a wedding cake for his birthday, and we were all set to borrow the tiered pans and columns and frosting tips from our friend Pengyew when he changed his mind. Phew.

But children's birthday parties? I know that this is going to sound crazy, but I always worry--basically until the small guests are leaving, goody bags in hand--that I'm going to totally biff it. Like, that a bazillion kids will show up with their ribbon-covered dresses, their ribbon-covered gift bags, and I'm going to be on the couch under a blanket, drunk. "There's no cake," I'll slur. "Help yourself to a Twinkie from the box. Oh wait, forget it, I ate them all." The pressure gets to me--the pressure of being a person who actually writes for FamilyFun, sure. ("Wow, she can't even throw a simple birthday party!" the parents will whisper to each other. "Do you think they know at the magazine? I mean, did you get a load of those streamers put up with masking tape? Nice.") But more the pressure of being the person in charge of managing the children's most special events and memories: holidays and school carnivals and birthdays and the birthdays of other children. What if I just don't deal? A raw turkey plunked on the table, Christmas stockings full of air, an apologetic shrug instead of a wrapped gift. At least it makes me compassionate. The parents who really don't deal? I can imagine. I can.

Wow. Where did that come from? Here I was simply going to tell you cheerfully about Ben turning ten, and about our favorite cake recipe! Because whatever cake the kids pick, and however complicated the icing and the covering in candies and candles and other edible and inedible decorative detritus, we always make the same base, which is my friend Emily's buttermilk cake recipe. It's always good: light and tender but sturdy enough to deal with the slicing and dicing and layering and frosting that come later. We have given out the recipe so many times that I actually found it on the computer just now, already typed up by Michael, who is usually the one who bakes it. He bakes; I do decorating duty. As divisions of labor go, it's not too bad. And we have never not dealt. So far. Knock wood.

Buttermilk Birthday Cake
Okay, I am leaving this recipe exactly as Michael wrote it out. Except for "half as much table salt." I added that. And I'm not giving you a frosting recipe. We sometimes use chocolate frosting, sometimes vanilla buttercream, sometimes tinted whipped cream. But this cake! This is the cake. But you know what? That swimming pool cake? That's not actually this cake! That's an ice cream cake! I forgot.

3/4 cup salted butter (1 1/2 sticks), room temperature
2 cups sugar
4 eggs, separated
2 tsp. vanilla
2 3/4 cups flour
1 1/2  teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)
1 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 350.
Butter & flour 2 cake pans. (Or a large rectangular pan or cupcake tins or whatever.)
Cream the butter with an electric mixer.
Add sugar and cream again until light and fluffy.
Beat in egg yolks and vanilla.
Mix dry ingredients together.
Add the dry ingredients alternating with the buttermilk.
Beat the egg whites until stiff, and fold them into the batter.
Bake 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. (Less or more time if you're using bigger or smaller pans.)
Cool on racks.

Get a printable version of this recipe.

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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