(Please note, this is not about the kind of mother I am , i.e., the kind that makes delicious home baked goods for her kids on their birthday. No, this is about the kind of chocoholic I am, the kind that goes to great lengths to get my buzz whenever it has been sufficiently long since the last time for me to forget how utterly not worth-it it was. Is. Will Be. All of the above.)

Paula Deen I ain’t. But, one can attempt a close approximation if one is willing to commit to a kitchen that looks like this:


Sights like these are always painful reminders of why I don’t cook, or bake, or breathe too heavily whilst in the kitchen lest disaster strikes. And now for a soupcon, a tidbit, if you will, of what some might call “too much information”. When I finally moved the hand mixer pictured on the right side of the sink, it somehow knocked the earth off of its axis, causing the bowl of murky water balancing oh-so-precariously on the stack of more of its kind to spill its contents onto the white plastic bag which was part of yesterday’s mail and had no business being halfway in the sink, anyway. I ask you, who’s in charge of this kitchen? What’s more, who’s in charge of the mail? I would fire her but she’s a dab hand at handling the big guy so she stays.

. . . plus an aching back and feet and a horrifying amount of calories consumed. And that's before the cake is even done.

Before I lose my cred with my peeps who like me mellow and not too domestic, let me say that I did not go the whole nine yards with this cake. First, I made the cake from a cheapie cake mix (instead of from scratch) and added 4 tablespoons of Ghiradelli brand unsweetened cocoa because the mix looked totally too pale. It was a good move.

I confess, I bought a mousse mix in case I ran out of steam but in the end I caved and made the mousse per the recipe. I worried about the fact that the mix mousse is a stand-alone product and couldn’t possibly take into account the frosting and cake with whom it was to be rubbing elbows. It turns out that the recipe mousse is quite a bit lighter which was a nice contrast.

The frosting: this is where things got a bit hairy. Who woulda thought? Then again, when you have one dumb baker who doesn’t know that 4 ounces of baking chocolate as per the packaging is not the same as 4 one ounce squares of baking chocolate which are, apparently, half an ounce each but considered one whole ounce. Make sense? Not to me which was precisely the problem. To make a long story short, I used twice the amount of unsweetened chocolate as was called for. Not a good move. Next, add a bottle of blue food coloring who wasn’t listening in class when told that he must squirt DOWN and not sideways at the wielder of said bottle. Good thing I was wearing dark blue pants at the time.

In the end, we did get a chocolate cake with blue frosting (on the top only because I wanted chocolate—never mind that its lovely meant-to-be-texture was ruined by my frantic attempts to sweeten it) with flowers (yay sprinkles!) and the hot rod cars that I felt were imperative to balance the hormonal aspect of the cake.

The moral of the story: This gal who has been off of wheat for five months (except for one little fall off the wagon a few weeks ago when the star of the party was a professionally baked chocolate six layer dream dessert), felt this cake just wasn’t worth the effort. Everyone else insisted it was delicious but what could they say when faced with a woman wielding a wooden spoon with chocolate all down her front and a wild look in her eye?

A very happy Little Guy (he gave the cake a 10, then a 20, then a 70--what can I say, he's generous like that) and his best buddy ever, Lucas, without whom his birthday would have been a sadly flat affair.