No piece of cake

There are certain things almost all parents expect to go wrong at their kid's first birthday party. Rain can ruin our outdoor plans. The child might be overwhelmed by the many guests. Perhaps the acrobats hired as entertainment will eat all the food. There are so many factors that could hamper the celebration, but one thing you don't expect is there to be a fierce battle between the kid... and the cake.

Jennifer and I expected Kyle to embrace his birthday cake this past Saturday. We thought he might dive head-first into it, getting the chocolate sponge all over his face, and frosting so far up his nostrils that he'd be smelling and sneezing chocolate until Christmas. Instead, he wouldn't have a sniff of it. When cake time came around, Kyle twisted and turned as we tried to put a little piece in his mouth. Even when we thought we had the slightest bit of success, he'd push it out with his tongue. As he fought us, Kyle's face turned red, tears ran down his face, and he wailed as if we were doing something so despicable, only Dick Cheney would approve of it.

It's not that this was a bad cake. Perhaps if I had made it, Kyle would have good reason to protest. The last cake I made was more than twenty years ago, when I was in Cub Scouts. My dad and I cooked one up for a father-son cake-baking auction. When the auction started, I realized I couldn't part with our masterpiece, so I convinced my parents to make the highest bid for it. They did, and after shelling out perhaps hundreds of dollars, we brought our cake home. It's a good thing, too. When we cut into it later that evening, we realized the inside wasn't fully cooked. I think we saved a few lives with our bid that day.

The cake at Kyle's party was, by many accounts, delicious. Since this was a special occasion, we bought the cake at the same place we picked up the dessert for Kyle's baptism, Fortunato Brothers bakery in Williamsburg. It was a chocolate sponge cake, with chocolate frosting and raspberry and banana filling, composed of real fruit instead of pudding. Needless to say, the cake went very quickly. You wouldn't know it, though, looking at Kyle's face as we tried to give him some. He never acts that way whenever we feed him peas.


We are perplexed. Kyle should be a cake lover, since it's in his genes. His mom and dad are crazy sweets addicts, and we can't resist a good cake. We are also huge ice cream fans, and yours truly has been guilty of going through one of those Ben & Jerry's pints in one sitting. It remains to seen whether Kyle will like ice cream. I'm not too optimistic, though, considering his track record. We may just have to serve him peas and green beans at his birthdays from now on. I suppose that wouldn't be so bad. After all, that's more cake and ice cream for me.