Of Birthdays Past

Today, as I turn another year older (and hopefully wiser, more grounded and centered too), a wave of nostalgia has washed over me.

For the past many years (too many to count on both hands and feet ), on each birthday, I get presented with an elegantly made cake from some 5-star hotel or renowned patisserie. These cakes are all very delicious, very refined, very elegant and, well, everything else that a “classy” cake should be. Yet, somehow, they seem to have lost their meaning and significance. I can buy and eat these cakes at any time during the year – which I do – and they are no longer special to birthdays.

And so my mind has been wandering back across time… to those years when each birthday cake was so terribly special and unique to me. The years when I always looked forward with great anticipation and excitement, months and months ahead of my birthday, to getting my birthday cake. The years when each cake was lovingly made by my mum, just for me. Yes, those were the years when each cake was unique to me; no one else would ever have that exact same birthday cake.

In this nostalgic frame of mind, I have been flipping through my old photo albums, looking at pictures of the birthday cakes of my childhood, and reliving some very beautiful memories. I would now like to invite you to take a walk with me, down this path of cake reminiscing…

My very first birthday cake was an elaborate affair: Humpty Dumpty celebrated my first milestone year with me. I should have been too young then to have any clear recollection of the cake. But I do. I remember it vividly. For some reason, I even have memories, albeit rather vague and foggy memories, about my mum having some incident with either a broken egg or an unsuccessful attempt in creating Humpty Dumpty. I remember hearing her discussing with my aunt how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, quite literally. How was I to have known about such things at 12 months old? I do not know. But that is something that has stuck in my mind through all these decades. And strange as it may sound, I remember very clearly how happy I felt about my first birthday cake – as you can see from my wide 2-tooth grin in the top picture!

But there was only so much photo-taking and waiting to tuck into the cake that a one year old could handle. So, after a couple of minutes of patient smiling for the camera, I was ready for action. When were we going to cut the cake already? (Notice how the cake was deliberately kept at a very safe distance from me? )

Yet, when the time did come to cut the cake, was my attention on the cake? Nooooo… I was too busy eyeing the guys at my birthday party! What can I say?

My second birthday was a simpler affair; yet still filled with a lot of love and warmth. I had a heart shaped cake decorated with Smarties – my “most favoritest” candy at the time.

See how demure I looked as I obediently kept my hands away from the cake, just as I was told to do? But what the camera did not subsequently record, and which my mum and aunts have recounted to me many times in the past, was that I honored that request for all of 30 seconds; just long enough for this shot to be taken. Then, before my parents or anyone else could remove me a safe distance from the cake, I had stuck not one finger, not even two fingers, but my entire hand… palm, fingers, the lot… into the cake. But really, what was a 2 year old to do in the face of so much yummy, soft white cream and colorful Smarties?

Here’s an interesting side note: notice how much like a boy I looked as a 2 year old? I think even my parents were a little worried back then. My favorite toys at that age, or so I have been told, were fire engines, aeroplanes, trucks and excavators! Fortunately, I outgrew my boyish phase, and have turned out to be quite the opposite!

My third birthday cake was one I remembered so very fondly for many, many years. It was another of my mum’s very dedicated and loving creations: a choo-choo train, replete with a box carriage filled with all sorts of wonderful sweets and candies. I had such vivid memories of the engine’s smiling face, the cotton wool smoke, and of feeling rather upset as all the other kids tried to steal the candy from the carriage!

Ah! The sight of all that food – all the “must-haves” for birthday parties of that time – brings back a flood of memories. Red-dyed hard boiled eggs, cubes of agar-agar, cocktail sausages on toothpicks, fried chicken wings, curry puffs… a table laden with abundant goodies.

My beloved late paternal grandmother, who loved and doted on me so dearly, helping me to do the honors.

By the time I was four, I was old enough to start making requests of my mother for the birthday cakes I wanted. And for some reason, I really wanted a cake in the shape of a house. It had to be a chocolate house, I specified. Oh yes, by that tender age, I had already developed a deep and abiding love for this dark ambrosia of the Gods; a love that has stayed with me to this day.

My clearest memory of this birthday cake? How patient and committed my mum was to giving me the cake I wanted. By then, I was old enough to be in the kitchen with my mum, watching and helping (or hindering, depending on how you look at it) her mix, bake and decorate the cake. And oh how she had to struggle with this cake. She had intended to create the roof of the house with butter cake, but that didn’t work. After spending a few hours trying this and that without success, we finally ended up with a roof made out of cardboard.

I remember how the roof was somewhat too heavy for the rest of the cake, and the house started to lilt a little. I also remember how there was much belly-aching laughter all round as I tried to cut through the very hard cardboard roof without success. The cake may not have been perfect looking, but it was perfect to me for the love that my mum had put into it. (Sorry, I don’t mean to sound so cheesy, but this cake does bring back some very special memories.)

It was sort of appropriate that for my fifth birthday I had a cake fashioned after the May Pole. I had watched fascinated as my mum so very carefully piped that intricate lattice design on to the top of the cake. And weren’t those sugar animals just the cutest?

This was a cake I picked out months before my birthday. My mum had a cookbook – the exact name of which I cannot now recall – which was filled with all manner of children birthday cakes; each recipe came with a glorious full color photo of the cake. I spent hours poring over the book; nearly every cake in there was one that I wanted! I think at the time I probably wished birthdays came once a month and not once a year, so that I could have all those cakes made for me!

After much internal struggle, I finally settled on the swimming pool design. And as had become ritual, my mum and I spent an afternoon in the kitchen decorating the cake together. We made green jello for the water, used pink dessicated coconut to pave the pathway and lined it with jelly sweets. Carefully we surrounded the cake with Cadbury’s milk chocolate fingers. What fun we had; each time we inadvertently broke one of those chocolate fingers, we simply popped them into our mouths.

Now, every girl has to have a Doll cake at some point. I mean, isn’t that some sort of ritualized tradition? And so I had mine on my seventh birthday.

I love my mum’s attention to detail. Look at the little rosette that my mum had piped onto the doll’s bodice. And that pert little lace hat. And oh, don’t you just love those two cute Bambis? That was my special request (at the time, I was going through my besotted-with-Bambi phase); and my mum never refused any of my birthday cake requests.

Another birthday tradition I think: every child seems to need a cake in the shape of a number. Mine came in the shape of an 8. Simple, yet lovingly made. It was very tasty too.

By the time I was nine, I seemed to have lost a lot of my interest in home-made birthday cakes. I guess at that age, such things seemed, well, passé. I wanted to be like my friends, whose mums never made them birthday cakes; theirs were always store-bought. I thought that was just the coolest. The follies of youth!

So for that year, my mum made me another number-shaped cake. That was the last of my home-made birthday cakes. It was around this time that we started the new tradition of buying ready-made cakes for birthdays. It was novel then. To buy a beautifully decorated cake from the cake shop was such an exciting process to me. I was taken to the cake shop and could gaze in wonderment at all the gorgeous cakes on display, and then pick out any design that I wanted.

So, we come full circle. Now, decades on, I have become jaded and uninspired by cakes made by the top pastry chefs of the land; I hunger for home-made simplicity. I long for cakes made with love and dedication. I hanker for a confection that is less refined, rustic almost; something that speaks to my heart.

I have thus, for the very first time in my life, made my own birthday cake. I have never ever given myself a birthday cake. And I like the feeling. I like the feeling a lot.

And here, I would like to pay a small tribute to my mum – for making each childhood birthday so incredibly special, for giving me so many precious birthday memories, and for inspiring my love for baking. While I may not have inherited her talent for cake decorating, I think I have definitely inherited her love of baking.

Thank you, mum!

On a final note, here’s something I would like to share with you. As I was going through the photo albums, I found this photo…

I was six months old, and it was my very first Christmas. Was I a chubby baby or what? Oh my! Look at that pram! What memories! So terribly English, no? My dad actually had that pram imported all the way from England, at a time when Mothercare was still unheard of in these parts. Heh. I even had on a dress with an Elizabethan collar to match the pram!

Okay, here’s something else: when I mentioned to friends that I was going to post my baby pictures, they threw me a challenge… Thus far, I have very consciously stayed rather anonymous online. Sure, my name is plastered all over this blog, but I have avoided putting up pictures of humans (have you noticed?). But my friends have been egging me and twisting my arm to post a picture of grown-up me.

So, after some “manhandling” from my beloved friends , I acquiesce and here it is (for a short time only): me, many Christmases on from that very first one, having a bit of a laugh posing in front of the camera…

Copyright © 2004 Renee Kho. All Rights Reserved.
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