Autism makes parties a hard one for Mo. Her dream birthday party, it appears, is to be booked into the Fortress of Solitude and left alone there. Last year, when it was time to blow out the candles, she hid out in her room, buried herself in stuffed animals and refused to come out.
Maybe the logic that funerals are for the living, I still insist on throwing her at least a small, informal family gathering. She loves her family, asks to go to Grandpa Calvins & Grandma Sharon's often, clearly loves her uncle, my brother, Grandma Mary, etc. But all of them at once is a kind of overload.
I can understand it this way, I think: I love Megadeth, Sonny Rollins, The Dead Kennedys, Shastakovich's Fifth Symphony, Bach organ music, and the Pogues. But if you played them all for me at once, at a high volume, I'd want to kick you in the nuts and run away.
But this year, at least, I got my favorite photo of all: my kid blowing out the candles on a cake I made for her birthday. I got into the from-scratch cakes after the divorce initially because I was so divorce broke that paying for a Price Chopper custom-decorated cake was prohibitive. All a cake is, really, is two cups of flour, three eggs, 3/4 cup mayo, a cup and a half of sugar... You can buy all the stuff to make the cake for less than five bucks. Well, you can until you stumble on the delights of cream cheese frosting and put three pounds of cream cheese and three sticks of unsalted butter with a bit of powdered sugar to frost the thing.
But I really enjoy the process of making the cake now, and I might have paid almost as much as a store cake by the time I had this monstrosity done, but it's so much better, for one thing because it's half frosting.
I got some Cool Whip because Mo loves it, along with some cookies & cream ice cream (Oreos are her favorite thing, so ice cream with Oreos in it is the only kind of ice cream worth considering). I also made some from-scratch whipped cream.
This started because I wanted to do raspberry frosting on Mo's cake. Chocolate and raspberry goes so well together, right? But when I asked Mo about it, she was really clear. She wanted a chocolate cake and white frosting, no other flavors please.
I struggled with this, but it was her birthday. Brian Gallmyer has one coming up, and he's a much easier audience, so I'll make him a raspberry chocolate birthday cake.
Corinna said she hated Cool Whip, that it seemed 'petroleumy' to her, so I figured I'd make some fresh whipped cream, too. I bought a quart of heavy cream at the store, made two batches of whipped cream.
The first batch I put raspberry extract into and purple food coloring. It turned out so well and so fast, I figured I'd make a vanilla batch, too. I put blue food coloring in it, just for interest, and at the point it started to seem whipped creamish, I thought maybe I could get it fluffier. I cranked up the KitchenAid a few more minutes and guess what I made?
Yep, sweet, blue butter. I knew I was in trouble when the volume in the bowl went down instead of up.
A good time and food orgy was had by all, I think, including Molly who only retreated to her bedroom twice.
I especially enjoy seeing my nephew, Austin, interact with our animals. He's interested in the 'kitty cats' but he's enthralled by the dogs. He's a lot more of a dog person than me, really, but he kept scaring Sheba with his high volume exclamations. She'd been abused before arriving in Lobster Land, and she assumes someone yelling is a dangerous thing. But with a little encouragement on both sides to mellow out and meet in the middle, and Austin was rubbing her submissive tummy.
No comments:
Post a Comment