On the occasion of the upcoming 4th birthday of my daughter on Saturday I have a lot of baking to do. There is the cake, of course, then there are cookies for the Saturday School, and there are cupcakes to be sent to preschool on Monday.

The layers for the cake are baking as I type this, I will assemble them tomorrow, probably in the evening when I have peace and quiet. The dough for the cookies is in the refrigerator. We will bake them tomorrow after school. The girls "need to" help with this. I made a simple dough for butter cookies and we will cut them out and decorate with sugar sprinkles. I will make the cupcakes on Sunday only. And I will not do anything else on Sunday (at least that is my plan).

The Birthday Cake is a conservative affair. Children are creatures of habit. She wants the same cake I made for her second birthday. We took a picture of that cake and in her mind this has become the quintessential birthday cake, the Platonic idea of a birthday day that sums up what a birthday cake should be. By now I have been making that cake a number of times, both for her and for her sister, and I guess is I will be making that same cake until they go off to college, if not longer.

It is a fine cake, vanilla with Seven-Minute-Frosting or "Italian Meringue" if you want to give it more allure. It is Martha Stewart recipe. (Thanks, Martha, you made it into our family history). By folding fold raspberry jam into the meringue you get a very pretty and pink filling. On the outside, the cake is covered with white Meringue. I just slather it on and then I make little indents with the back of a spoon. It looks very fluffy and festive. Then I put some of the pink filling in a Zip-loc bag (in lieu of a pastry bag), and maybe add a few drops of beet juice of it is too pale, and dab on dots that form little flowers. This is not fancy decorating at all but it looks very pretty and girlish. The last cake for my older daughter only had pink polka dots. I can't remember now why that was, but it still was cute.

The layers are done now. One is perfect, the other one a bit lop-sided. Such is life. I am going to bed now. I am not feeling too well. The almost-birthday girl has been under the weather as well complaining of a sore throat and an earache. I hope she will be better on Saturday.

I promise I will post a picture of that cake and the miscellaneous baked items.  11:53:49 PM    
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I have some block about blogging. It has nothing to do with food or preserving and what I am (or am not) doing in these areas. I always intended this to be "room of my own" free-wheeling kind of thing. It is not true that I don't have anything to write about. Time? Well, is there ever any. So there go all the excuses.

The truth is that I have a block about self-expression in general, not just blogging. I know why that is, and I know what instilled in me this deep deep feeling that writing is not only silly, a waste of time, ridiculous, arrogant and what-not, but that it also can get you into trouble.

So what. I am a grown-up and I have to get over it. My daughter has to write a journal entry every day. It can be about anything. She has to write, that is all. I am keeping after her about it, but she loves to write anyway. She writes all the time. She writes in her journal and then, before she goes to bed, she writes wild fiction. I will never ever discourage her from writing.

So now I will do the same. I will write something every day, about my day, be it food or marmalade or anything. By now anybody visiting this blog already knows anyway that this is not a glossy food-blog. There are plenty of those around. I need a space for myself. Enough for today.  12:23:17 AM    
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