Birthday Cake Blues

Nathan’s birthday is finally here. Since the pandemic, I started the tradition of making a birthday for each of my immediate family members. I spent the whole day baking and decorating the cake. I certainly cannot make a living with my baking skills, or lack thereof – but that’s ok. I enjoy baking, and enjoy learning to make something new each time. I usually follow the recipes to T. This time, the only deviation I did was changing the whipped cream frosting color from pink to blue, because that’s Nathan’s favorite color.

I carefully placed the fresh strawberries and blueberries on top as decorations before putting the cake in the fridge. I then took out a few oblong cookies, melt some semi-sweet chocolate and piped the birthday message on those few cookies. They were then placed in the freezer.

Two of my closest friends and their families came over for the birthday dinner. The heartwarming company was refreshing, especially after a week of hard work. We all ate more than usual, and I allowed myself to do that.

Time came for the cake cutting. I carefully brought the cake to the kitchen, the cake with strawberry jam flavored blue whipped cream. The cake that was partially covered with white whipped cream on stop. The cake with fresh strawberries and blueberries. I took out the cookies from the freezer, and slowly put the few cookies at the bottom of the cake, so it read, “Happy 10^th Birthday Nathan.”

As soon as the cookies were in position, my friend pointed out that I misspelled “birthday”. I took a closer look – yes I did, spelled “bithday” instead.

I chose to be humored. I was not embarrassed. I was not angry. I thought that it was very funny. I laughed, and my girlfriends laughed too. We then came up with a quick solution – we would omit the “birthday” cookie, so the message would read, “Happy 10^th Nathan” instead.

Time with family and friends is very precious to me. I treasure every single moment. I’d rather have a sense of humor, a sense of belonging and be content than to beat myself up for being careless and misspelled a word.