The Double-Layer Chocolate Cake I Make for My Son’s Birthday
When I called my son, Joshua, on his birthday last month, his first words were, “You’re a minute early!” And I was. But that was the only unpredictable part of our conversation. Every year, I call at 9:40 a.m. to recount the story of his birth. I tell him that it snowed lightly that day; that I could see the Statue of Liberty from the hospital room and that her torch was speckled white; that an instant after he was born, his father declared, “Not Ivan!” the name we thought we would give him if he turned out to be a he; and that the first thing he tasted was a drop of Champagne. If I had it to do all over again, I would include a crumb of cake — every birthday should have cake. And every one of Joshua’s did.
For his 1st birthday, we had a big party, and I baked cookies for the kids and a boozy coconut cake topped with a chocolate “1” for the parents. (It was the first time I’d tempered chocolate, and the “1” was wonky.) There was the year I covered a cake with Swedish fish. And the one when I succumbed to Fudgie the Whale, the Carvel ice-cream cake. There was the “May the Fours Be With You” year, when I bought a Darth Vader pan and, just as suggested on the package, a box mix for the cake. There were carrot cakes and banana cakes, other ice-cream cakes (homemade!), cakes covered in frosting and others slathered in whipped cream, all of them big and, like the moment they celebrated, meant to be shared.
What wasn’t shared, what I selfishly kept to myself, was the immense happiness I felt as I baked something that would mark a milestone for someone I loved inordinately. For all the baking that I did, making a birthday cake was different. Being in the kitchen measuring and mixing, filling, frosting and finishing the cake gave me time to think about my son and the year that had passed. Had I kept a journal, I might have read it on his birthday. Instead, I baked.
One year, maybe it was when he turned 11, I baked a double-layer chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and, because he loved it so much, it became the birthday cake, one I make only for his birthday. Over the course of a couple of decades, I’ve tweaked the recipe here and there, but it remains essentially the same. The cake itself is dark and chocolate through and through, a devil’s-food cake that’s good cold (when it’s easiest to slice) and at room temperature (which is what it usually is by the time everyone’s been served a piece). This cake has nothing to do with what I had as a child — while I always had cake, I never had one that was homemade, nor did I ever have the same cake twice — and yet, to me, it tastes old-fashioned. It gets its color and flavor from both cocoa powder and melted bittersweet chocolate, as does the frosting, an all-American butter cream that fills the layers generously. Straight from the bowl, the frosting is soft and billowy, the right texture to spread across the top of the cake in swirls and waves, the right consistency to capture and hold onto sprinkles, crushed cocoa nibs, toasted nuts or tiny candies. It’s a kid’s cake that gets grown-ups remembering their own childhoods — noisy birthday parties with silly decorations and games, the cold milk that always came with the cake and the inevitability of leaving the table with chocolate-smudged lips.
This year, we were 10 for Joshua’s birthday dinner. The conversation bounced around the table as quickly as a Ping-Pong ball. There was plenty of laughter, serious talk too, and then there was the cake. It was set down in front of Joshua, and as I looked around the table, now hushed, and saw the smiles on his friends’ faces, I could almost see each of them as they might have been years earlier. Joshua bent over the cake, closed his eyes, made a wish — a long one — and then blew out the candles in a whoosh. If there weren’t so many other good reasons to bake this cake, I might have done it just for this singular moment, the short instant when the possibility of a wish come true seems tantalizingly real.
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