*** From Me to Myself ***

Here’s a little something from me to myself to cope with this crisis of getting one year older ; ) My homemade Birthday Cake I spent all afternoon yesterday making this special cake. To rationalize the time and effort I was going to spend on it, the cake had to be really special, the one and only cake on the face of the earth. So I decided to do everything I had always wanted: 1. Making a square-shaped cake. Japanese birthday cakes are usually round, but I miss the kind of cakes I had in the U.S…. 2. Writing “Happy Birthday ” on a cake. It sounds like something you can do anytime, but actually, I haven’t done it before. 3. Using “sugared violet” for garnishing a cake. I saw “sugard violet ” in a baking book when I was a kid and got charmed by it. It just sounded so romantic! In order to give a little extra flavor to the cake, I added a little grated orange rind and orange juice when making the cake batter. I used “Kiyomi” orange, which is said to be the hybrid of tangerine and trovita oranges. To be perfectly honest, it made the cake a little heavy, but I loved the orange flavor! It was really a big challenge for me, but I did slice the cake in half and sandwiched whipped cream and flesh of Kiyomi orange. Now I have to confess that I’m not good at handling cream at all. It always takes so long for me to whip cream, even though I use a lot of ice cubes to cool it while whipping, and I get tired. Especially this time, the orange-colored one was runny no matter how hard I whipped, probably because of the tiny amount of water I added to dissolve the food coloring powder and orange curacao? Anyway, I’m not going to tell you how long it took for me to decorate this cake, but finally!! I managed to smooth the surface and wrote “Happy Birthday” on it. When I put the sugared violet on the cream, I had a great feeling of accomplishment. It did NOT turn out exactly as I had dreamed of, but at least I tried out everything I had been dreaming of. It is nice to know that someone (even it was myself) spent so much time and effort for my birthday, after all. A Big Piece for myself, of course. So this is my XXth birthday, folks. Looks like I love trying something new and/or different, and it’s not going to change no matter how old I get ;) BTW, I tasted the sugared violet for the first time in my life, and it’s amazing! I expected it to be just sugar-sweet with no particular flavor, but it does have very distinctive flavor!! I wonder if the flavor was artificially added… or is it something that naturally comes from the violet??? Hmmmmm…. I love it! It tastes so good with nice black tea.