Birthday Girl

It was a couple weeks after the fact, but we finally got the family more or less together for Em's 19th birthday.

She asked for a 'lime green' cake. As a designer, I hate such imprecise language for communicating color.

One person's 'lime' green is another person's 'kelly' green is another person's 'mint' green. Or 'forest' green.

I put a full bottle of 'neon' green food coloring in the frosting, then most of a bottle of just 'green' and about a half bottle of yellow and decided, that looks more or less like a lime skin. Sorta.

I'd offered to make it lime flavored as well. Citrus and chocolate is a combo I can get on board with, a lot easier than mint-chocolate anyway. A little lime zest, a dash of lime juice, in a frosting that's mostly cream cheese and butter, what could go wrong? But no, she only wanted the color.

As I frosted the cake, I realized all my cakes look exactly the same except for color. I only use one recipe, that's part of it, and I tend to make way too much frosting because I don't really like cake that much but I love frosting.

I cut back slightly on the frosting level this year, I only used 2-1/2 pounds of cream cheese, a half pound of butter, maybe 3/4 cup of powdered sugar. That's down from three pounds of cream cheese last year, when I had to be pretty creative to get all the frosting 'on' the cake.