Today, December 20, is my mom Cherie’s birthday. In her honor I am sharing stories about some of the beautiful and elaborate birthday cakes she made over the years. This was a skill that she no doubt inherited from her mother, Edie Kossuth, whose cakes were legendary in Cleveland, Ohio, where my mom grew up. From the time I was four, she would regularly bake me a special lamb cake for my birthday, which often fell right around Easter. She used an old fashioned cast iron mold to make the cake in two halves, and the trickiest part was the fragile ears, which would often come off the head during the frosting stage and had to be reattached with toothpicks (!). Being the animal lover that I am, I always felt bad about eating the head, and so she would wrap it plastic and put in the freezer, where it would sometimes stay for months until I gave in. Even when I was away at college, I remember her coming to visit on my birthday and bringing a lamb cake to my apartment. My older brother Greg was once very into medieval knights. So my mother made him castle cake for his 9th birthday in 1972, complete with turrets and an inner courtyard for his favorite knights, that somehow she successfully transported in the car from Maryland to New Jersey so we could have the birthday party with our Blando cousins. And this was in the days before nonstick cookware (!). My Aunt Jackie, matriarch of the Blando clan, shares the same March birthday month as her brother, my dad. And so another year my mom made a huge square cake covered with handmade frosting daisies for the two families that she again transported all the way to New Jersey. I haven’t seen a cake that big since. Daisies made another appearance on a beautiful cake she made for Dad’s 70th birthday celebration in 2009 down in Virginia with their good friends from around Smith Mountain Lake. The cake was clearly a special highlight of the evening, generating many oohs and ahhs. Recently I tried my own hand at making for the first time a red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting. Not only did it come out lopsided, but the weight of too much frosting on the low side opened up a three-way crevice in the center as if it had been put through an earthquake! Oh well, I thought to myself. As Mom would say, that’s ok, as long as it tastes good! Which thankfully, it did, and was still enjoyed by all. Happy Birthday Mom!