11 years old – 11 years of fabulous cakes.

I’m generally in charge of choosing and buying my kids’ birthday presents, but my husband does one very special thing for them every year – make a phenomenal cake.  He did go to culinary school, but only spent about a day or so on pastry. It’s mainly self-taught. And it’s such a clear illustration of his love for our kids and how that relationship has evolved over the years. My older son’s 11th birthday brought about the latest of my husband’s creations.

The Caterpillar Cake

(Unfortunately, I can’t find a photo of this one! Trust me, it was very cute.)

A one year old’s birthday is largely about celebrating that the parents have kept this small being alive for a year. We were exhausted – my older son wouldn’t sleep through the night for another 6 months – and still incredibly uncertain of everything as parents. But we knew we loved this kid and we were going to make his first birthday party adorably awesome. The big theme just seemed charming. Perhaps there’s some symbolism of caterpillar into butterfly, but it was mainly that it was one of the simpler cakes to make of a bug.

The Teddy Bears’ Picnic Cake

He was starting to get more and more personality while solidly being in the “cute toddler” phase. The Teddy Bear’s Picnic was a fanciful theme that we could still get away with before he started having his own opinions. The party ended up getting rained out, with a bunch of kids and parents stuffed in our small, just refinished basement. Finding ways to compensate for unexpected circumstances and still have it work out in its own unique way became a theme of our parenting journey.

The Daniel Tiger Cake

We thought we had gotten through the terrible twos mostly unharmed and three was going to be just delightful. But it was already shaping up to be a year of Big Feelings. His brother had been born just a few months earlier and while he seemed to like this new little being, there was some serious tension. (It didn’t help that for six months of my pregnancy, I physically wasn’t allowed to pick up my older son.) Three is also when kids can start arguing back to you. With a kid who has an inherent push-back against demands, there was a lot going on for us. Thank God for Daniel Tiger’s songs to help us out.

The Train Cake

With my younger son getting older and me being able to be away from him for longer periods of time, I worked hard this year to spend more one-on-one time with my older son. In the day-to-day sense, that meant a whole lot of slow walks down to the pedestrian bridge overlooking the train tracks. He loved watching for the Metro subway cars, gazing out in the distance to see if they were coming. That stroll down to the bridge became our almost daily routine, me following a child who always moved in his own time. It triggered all of my “augh, why aren’t we moving faster!” inflexibility while also opening my eyes to the beauty of looking at the ordinary wonders all around us.

The Bug Cake II

At this point, my older son had really started getting into nature, enough that he wanted his party at the local nature center. Something about the small, tiny animals of the world has always fascinated him. Even now, he’s the kid who will stop in the middle of a walk to look at a caterpillar or squirrel. So of the parties they offered, he picked the bug one. At the party, he and his fellow preschoolers astonished the nature center educator when they easily named the parts of a butterfly’s lifecycle, including metamorphosis. After the little talk, we went on a short hike. There, the kids followed directions perfectly, but my husband picked up a snake. The kids informed him, “You aren’t supposed to touch the wildlife!”

The Mario Bros. Cake

Around 5 years old, we started letting our older kid play video games. Figuring that he couldn’t make too much trouble with classic games, we started him on the original Super Mario Bros. Despite it taking about a million runs to get past the first Goomba and pit, he was immediately enthralled. We’ve never had an iPad and didn’t show him much TV, so this was a novel experience. While there were other games available, Mario had captured his heart. That year, we had a fully-themed Mario Bros. party, complete with an obstacle course through the playground that ended with punching a giant question block. My kid requested a cake that looked like a Mario level. It was the first time he had requested a specific cake design, so my husband was going to deliver. Never playing it safe, my husband decided now was the time he was going to teach himself to use fondant. And make his own fondant. I was skeptical. But much to my pleased surprise, the cake – a replica of the first screen of the first level of Super Mario Bros, complete with that pesky Goomba – came out amazingly.

This was also the last birthday before COVID hit. It turned out to be his last big birthday party at all. Considering the absolute stress that every party sparked, I wasn’t sad to be done with them. My kids have just wanted family and going to the zoo ever since.

The Not-a-Fancy Cake

A birthday in the third month of COVID was always going to be a bit of a let-down. No party (obviously). No relatives visiting. No going anywhere, like the zoo. Just not much of anything. But honestly, after the stress of past years, it was a bit of a relief. In addition, first grade was a very tough year for my older kid, so he welcomed school getting canceled. No school was better than anything we could have gotten him. Besides, any cake would have been overshadowed by his big gift – the announcement that we were going to get a pet rabbit.

The Rabbit Cake

Rabbits are my older son’s kindred animal. He has a deep, spiritual connection with them. When he was very little, he had an imaginary friend who was a rabbit. His favorite stuffed animal was a white rabbit named Snowball. So it was an epic event to get a real, live rabbit as a pet. When we went to go pick out Hoppity, the breeder had the mom and all of the baby rabbits in a basket. It was one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen. The babies weren’t old enough to leave their mom, but we wanted to check them out. My son held out his hand and one little bunny hopped over and started sucking on his finger. Obviously, he had picked us.

Upon establishing a relationship with this adorable, ridiculous animal, my son fell even more in love. He even has a shirt that says, “Sorry – I can’t. I have plans with my rabbit.” This cake is a tribute to this love.

The Kirby Cake

While Mario will always be his first love in video games, my older son did eventually expand his taste. The first non-Mario game he really loved was Kirby. For those not familiar, Kirby is a “friend-shaped” pink blob who has god-like powers of gaining the skills of whatever he eats. His games are all a bit psychedelic. Not long after my older son started playing it, my kids discovered the joys of manga. There’s a quirky manga / anime / record store near our house that we sometimes stop by on our bike ride home from school. We quickly racked up a collection of every Kirby manga available in America.

The Patrick Mario Maker Cake

What’s better than playing a video game? Being able to make your own levels and have other people play them! That’s the basic concept behind Mario Maker and it’s a pretty brilliant one. While not exactly educational by any stretch of the imagination, I appreciated that my son was exercising some creativity. This brick guy is the little mascot for the game, who teaches you how to build levels.

The Pikmin Cake

The latest and greatest cake, as well as my son’s current video game preoccupation. In the Pikmin games, you play a space explorer who crash-lands on a strange planet – which happens to be Earth. You walk around pulling up Pikmin, which are these odd flower-like monsters who help you. When we were considering this year’s cake, my husband said, “I have an idea, but I don’t know if it’s going to work…” When I heard it, I thought “That is unhinged, but it will be so cool if he pulls it off.” It was the sort of thing that if you asked a cake maker to make it, they’d say, “Wait, what?” But he did it! He made pikmin (via cake pops with fondant) and buried them in the cake for each person to pick. To top it off, there were three pikmin waiting to get in the “onion,” their weird little regeneration pod. It was a delightfully unique cake based on a delightfully game for a delightfully unique kid.

There are many ways to show your love. One of my husband’s is in pastry and I love that for him and our family.

Do you have any special birthday traditions in your family?