May 26, 2003
One Year
Once upon a time, there was a baby girl. In the fullness of time, she learned to roll and sit and babble, and one day, her parents realized she was one year old. So of course they threw a big party.
This whole affair came about because of my pigheaded decision that my daughter deserved better than some store-bought birthday cake. I am decidedly on the snobbish side of the culinary fence, and that meant no buttercream, no partially hydrogenated palm oil, no saccharine expression in icing on my Sasha's cake.
This also gave me an opportunity to exact a passive-aggressive revenge on my in-laws. I do not care for chocolate. I enjoy it from time to time, certainly, but there are many other things in life I enjoy much more. My hidden agenda, therefore, was to offer no chocolate to my guests, because when I have dessert with that side of the family, I am never offered anything else. So HAH. Take THAT!
This was the first cake I ever made. No, no cake mix was involved. For those who want the details: It was a buttermilk cake in two layers, filled with vanilla pastry cream and strawberries, frosted with whipped cream, with ladyfingers, crushed sugar wafers, and gumdrops as decoration. Not bad, but I'll have to do something more impressive next year. Perhaps something involving fondant.
The birthday girl had a fabulous time at her party for the first couple of hours. She particularly enjoyed eating the pita and hummus. Yay, another way to get protein and fat into her! Sadly, she petered out in the middle of the party and had to go down for a nap. As a result, she never actually ATE any of her birthday cake, and the presents had to wait until much later in the evening.
Before and during the party, Michelle and Jake were absolute heroes. They were willing kitchen assistants, decorators, baby wranglers, and more! Jake grilled out in the pouring rain! Michelle suffered the grossness of salmonella juice to help me assemble chicken skewers! Without them, I would not have pulled off the party as gracefully as I did.
Of course, without them, I also wouldn't have gone to the zoo the day before and would have done a lot of party prep a lot earlier. But I am still exceedingly grateful. Michelle also took a lot of photos and assembled a wonderful photo gallery. Check it out for a more complete record of events.
Later on, we all changed into our skivvies and checked out the loot. Sasha got a lot of fun toys, and was even willing to share. Such a good girl!
It should also be noted that Timothy enjoyed Sasha's toys, too. I think he was getting high off new plastic fumes or something.
My kitchen is: Actually cleaner the day after the party (and before the cleaners came) than it had been the morning *before* the party. Funny how that works. Although we did discover an odd little mystery: We bought a package of 22 hot dogs, and 3 packages totaling 24 buns. We were left with no hot dogs and 6 buns. Hmmm.
Posted by andrea at May 26, 2003 08:14 PM