Birthday cakes

In the beginning, there was the birthday and the birthday was with cake and cake was the birthday. And the same was in the beginning with *cake:

* Actually, you can probably see that that is a pan of chocolate brownie, rather than cake, but this is a minor detail best left from the narrative for fear of obfuscating the essence of the passage.

This photograph was taken at the best possible moment -- festooned with 34 lit candles, seconds later the candles started to melt as one and a layer of hot, coloured wax was deposited on the cake. You may have thought that this would be an impediment to the consumption of the cake, but it was not; the cake was served hot and almost-cooked, with a large amount of fresh whipped cream. It was paired by our sommelier with a stunningly-good 2006 Johannesdorf gewürtztraminer.

Later on the cake was unfairly targeted by a vicious smear campaign, as one's tummy complained long and hard about the ingestion of this confused mixture of substances.

o o o

Some time later, it came to pass that a second cake was proposed, and the birthday promptly moved upon the kitchen bench and made it so. And the birthday saw that the cake was good:

You probably won't recognise the cake as the classic "Ghost" design, with a sheet of marzipan 'draped' over a conical sponge cake, but veritably that is what it is. It's also not the most moist number ever; it is due to be introduced to a bottle of marsala, or possibly tripel sec, in the very near future.

Severed Heads - We Have Come To Bless This House (5.38 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

You possibly should never expect the worst.