Hannah’s first birthday called for a new dress, fresh wrapping paper and the perfect recipe.
The tiresome books on baby nutrition offered little by way of inspiration. Unsweetened, unfrosted carrot cake, one instructed, would provide an adequate portion of vitamin-A-packed orange vegetable, while avoiding the hazards of refined sugar. Another counseled that applesauce cake, decorated with a sprinkle of cinnamon, would suffice. A self-righteous paperback insisted on skipping birthday cake altogether. What would the uninitiated honoree miss anyway?
Obviously, these books missed the point. This was my first baby’s first birthday, the culmination of a year that had transformed her from blue-eyed stare to vibrant — and highly opinionated — Hannah. No cinnamon-sprinkled applesauce would do.
Actually, Hannah had already discovered sweet indulgence. In her crawling days, she had refused all efforts to introduce her to the joy of cooking. Blended baby peas, strained organic carrots, pureed apples — any flecks that seeped through her clamped baby lips were rejected with an outrage that asked: Why are you trying to poison me? That is, until the day, in jest, I offered her a mouthful of the fluff I myself was spooning up surreptitiously. It was tiramisu.
One of the aggravating things about baby food in the advice-column era is that little variety is permitted. No cheese. No eggs. No sugar. No wheat flour. No cocoa. No coffee. No alcohol. Which is the entire ingredient list for tiramisu. Hannah tasted. Then, in one ear-splitting holler, lunged for the bowl.
Later, after she’d negotiated terms with both noodles and broccoli, she made a seismic discovery by way of an errant Hershey’s chip. I found her seated on the kitchen floor, smeared from cheek to cheek. Her expression was one part joy, one part indignation. What had I been hiding?
So, it’s not as if I could slough off on this birthday cake business. To do right by such a fiercely passionate critic would take effort. I couldn’t guess whether my labors, in the limited span of her vocabulary, would merit a terse “No!” or the endearingly direct “More!”
There comes an age when the baby books begin to relent in their litany of off-limits cuisine. And a time when a mother must assert herself. I settled on a recipe: all chocolate.
I stocked up on sweet butter and Lindt, brown sugar and flour, the fancy cake-making kind. Like a challah for the Jewish new year, I wanted to start with everything pristine. I ordered deep spring-forms and a sleek frosting knife from Sur La Table, along with a children’s sous-chef set. It came with a tiny muffin pan, a little rolling pin, a tart mold, a bear-shaped cookie cutter and a baby-sized cake pan.
The day before the big day, I wrapped an apron around Hannah, twice. I sifted flour and sugar and baking soda into a bowl; she scooped it out. Eventually, we achieved a sticky mess of a batter. Leery of the hot-oven/clumsy baby combination, I baked the layers late, letting them cool in the darkened kitchen. I beat buttercream, one batch chocolate, one plain, and thought about the night, a whole year earlier, I had followed Julia Child’s five-page recipe for braided apricot Danish, hoping its complexity would ease the longest wait I’d ever known.
In the morning, I sliced two layers into four, then stacked and filled and leveled. My experiment in raspberry-tinted buttercream curdled, so I relied on chocolate, inside and out. By the time Hannah’s baby guests were trudging down the hall, I hadn’t managed a single rosette. Instead of the flower-strewn abundance I’d imagined, the cake, pure and smooth, was graced with a single candle.
There was a round of “Happy Birthday.” A toast. A puff of smoke. And a slice for everyone. Hannah liked hers. I can tell by the way she still grins in the snapshot we took, and the way she’s covered — curls to toes — in chocolate.
