Birthdays and Treasure Hunts

If you are in any way at all a regular reader of this blog, I congratulate you. I am not a regular writer, and blogs that are devoid of content for months on end tend to be ones that are read only by spouses, close friends and people who hit the "next blog" button on blogger. Still, if you are in fact a regular reader, you've probably freed yourself of certain expectations, like regularly produced, thoughtful content, and also any sense of chronology. For example, the wedding cake below was crafted well after the birthday cake shown in this photo - not that I needed to tell you, as if you are reading this blog, you probably tried at least one of them. So the birthday cake was pretty tasty, despite being made largely by the blog author, with the assistance of Finn and Conor for Conor's ninth birthday. It was very heavy on the raspberries - a raspberry sponge cake, with raspberry buttercream filling and raspberry icing (and a white chocolate buttons on top). The cake was well earned, as earlier in the day the birthday boy and five of his friends embarked on a five mile treasure hunt around the neighborhood and culminating at Pendragon books. Many thanks to our friends in the mysterious Thomas Avenue Treasure Hunt Society for their ingenious course plotting.

And not to get all Tevye here, but the years do fly by remarkably quickly. Happy incredibly belated birthday, my beautiful boy.

She bakes wedding cakes

Cakes are a hobby. Birthday cakes for kids are fun - there's a wide range of possible themes, kids tend to be pretty forgiving on the decor as long as the pokemon/mario/sleeping beauty is somewhat recognizable, and if one screws up so extravagantly that the cake is unsalvageable (not that this happens to the eponymous she, but perhaps to others), there's always going to be another birthday next year. Wedding cakes are a different story. There's pretty much one theme (unless you're one of those people who gets married at Disneyland), brides have a reputation as being a little less than flexible in terms of what they want their cake to look like, and aspirationally (if not statistically), there are no do-overs. So if you're going to make a wedding cake, you'd best get it right. And of course, she did.

Even if making wedding cakes was not something that she had wanted to do, this was a favor long in the coming. She made this cake for Christine, who introduced the cakemaker to the author of this blog, and Martin, a nice young German fellow who is rather obsessed with cowboy culture. As a compromise between Christine's ideas (classic wedding stuff, maybe with the color purple involved) with Martin's (last wedding cake at the OK corral), Lisa came up with the attached. The cowboy hat is a fondant covered rice krispie treat edged with gum paste. The purple bands around the cake are from the pattern of a leather gunbelt and holster that Martin sports around town. Not with an actual gun in it, of course, this being Berkeley and all.

Anyway, aside from the jitters arising from a neighbor's kid taking a bite of the frosting just before we had to deliver the cake, all went well. Bride and groom seemed happy, and sixty wedding guests ate pretty much the whole thing, including the hat. Good omen, that.

Teachable Moment

I think that's the term that more patient parents use whenever their children do something particularly vexing. We have our share of such moments around here, though they are not equally allocated on a per child basis - Aoife has few, due to, among other things, her limited language skills and mobility hindering significantly her efforts at sass and destruction, Conor has them fairly frequently, though given his propensity for reading while walking, brushing teeth and (turn away, safety mavens of america) skateboarding, it appears he may just not be teachable on that point, and Finn, sweet Finn, strings just enough moments of charm between his constant teachable moments that we have not yet succumbed to the temptation to send him to boarding school. Although sometimes it's close. All that being said, we are excited for summer in the Hennessey household. Aoife's plans include learning to walk and talk, Finn's include making cookies every weekend, and Conor intends to read for at least two hours a day. We're also going to the pool daily and spending nights on the street with the denizens of north Thomas. So, though all have different plans, they are united in their love for the summer, and the consequent end of school. But not so all children. One girl in particular, Ms Amy G, is enough of a fan of learning that for her summer birthday she requested the one thing she couldn't have - school. While we were not able to break into any of our local elementary educational institutions to host her party, Lisa did manage to put together a fairly nice school themed cake. I'm quite partial to the teacher's apple - it's a giant rice-krispie treat, sculpted, covered in fondant, and painted to look like a red delicious, and even my notoriously school averse boys appreciated the fondant pencil and crayons. Amy's mother (a tenacious attorney come tenacious teacher) paid the high compliment of only begrudgingly handing it over to her daughter, pointing out that this kind of cake is wasted on 8 year olds. I'm not sure if I totally agree; it's a fairly magical cake, and no one appreciates magic like an 8 year old.

Diary...

Not for me. I'm not much of a diarist myself - apologies to Samuel Pepys, but they always seem a bit pre-teen girl to me. However, Finn is really trying to read these days, and his two favorite books are "Diary of a Wombat" and "Diary of a Baby Wombat." It's not hard to see why he enjoys them so much; they are filled with short, declarative sentences, most of which end in mayhem, destruction or the consumption of Wombat treats (largely carrots).

Still, if I were to keep a diary, I'd probably note with some mournfulness the rapid passage of time, especially in light of Finn's first day of school tomorrow. I've packed his lunch and tried to keep as closely as I could to his request (hotdogs and strawberries, with strawberries and cookies for a snack), got out his clothes for tomorrow (he'll probably pick a BART themed shirt) and planned his special breakfast. Today was about the best day the day before school can be. We biked to the farmers market (note to new readers: while we don't live in Berkeley, we're pretty Berkeley), played with friends on the street (hoses and water balloons featured prominently, along with some ant slaughter), and barbecued before being shuffled protesting to bed. I'm sure there will be many days like this to come, but this one took on nostalgic sepia tones pretty quickly. So, in keeping with the theme of the blog and also with Finn's entrance into the hallowed halls of academia, below is a picture of some graduation cupcakes Lisa made for some friends, as well as some photos of Finn - one recent, one less so.



Graduation Cakes



Finn at Gilroy Gardens



Finn at his most corpulent

Poke-somethings

Some people probably find my sporadic blogging schedule charming. "Will there be an update this month? No? Perhaps in 2011?" I feel that it gives the hoi polloi something to look forward to and chat about on these dark and chilly bay area evenings. Unfortunately, my wife is not one of these people. I have largely myself to blame, as her expectations on the speed of content generation and her consumption of said content have been set by her iPhone, a birthday present that she has taken to in the same way that lab rats take buttons that they can push to send a quick zap into the pleasure centers of their brains. My usual response after being asked if I only updated this thing annually is that I'd write more if she baked more. However, she's been quick to point out that there's somewhat of a backlog of items that for one reason or another (indolence, and some sort of synonym for indolence), I've failed to post on.

With that in mind, here's a Pokemon cake that she made for Conor's friend Oliver late last year. Even at the best of times, I'm not too sharp on these guys names. Add ten months from baking time and the sleeplessness of new fatherhood (throat clearing from Lisa on that point), and I'm afraid that I'm quite useless - the yellow one is Pikachu. I think the one that looks like a turtle is called Turtwig. Beyond that, it's anyone's guess. Well, anyone, unless you are a 5-7 year old boy, in which case I'm quite sure you can identify them all, and then smirk that they're not nearly as powerful as some of the legendary Pokemon that you have in your card set.

Look what she made!

I never really played a lot of video games. We never had a Nintendo or anything of that ilk when I was younger. By the time I was in college, my younger brother had somehow managed to persuade our parents to get him a Sega Genesis, but we only had a couple of games. At that point I was in my late teens, and having not banked the necessary man hours to become a Gladwellian expert, and being the possessor of rather slow thumbs, I didn't play that much because frankly, one can only get killed on level one of a game so many times before finding it both uninteresting and a little humiliating. Still, I do have fond memories of Mario. I don't remember where I played it, but I think that everyone in America did. And I certainly remember where I played Mario Kart - in the living room of my law school basement apartment, with my roommates and various friends and usually several bottles of malt liquor covering the thrift store coffee table. So when Lisa said that the mom of one of Conor's former pre-school friends had asked her to make a Mario cake, I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe the kid is a retro-chic hipster who's only going to appreciate the cake ironically, but sincere or not, it's way cooler than Bakugan.



As awesome as the Mario cake is (I'd like one for Labor day please sweets), I think it's safe to say that Lisa's talent for cake decoration has been passed on to our kids. As proof, I'd like to present the cake that the boys decorated for my birthday. It has all of the things that are most important in their lives - candy and legos (OK, not the most important things but pretty important, not to mention books would get ruined by the frosting, and I came down firmly against Finn's plan to cover the cake in garbage). Conor's original concept was to have two lego figures playing soccer, the soccer ball being portrayed by a jawbreaker. Beyond that, the rest of the plan involved testing the adhesive powers of Lisa's buttercream frosting by sticking as many candies as possible to the top and sides of the cake. However, in a moment of creative genius, Conor decided that there should be another Lego guy on the cake, but this guy would be face down in the frosting, having tripped over a grape skittle. After a bout of pratfall-humor induced hysteria, Finn decided that the cake needed a several more faceplanted Lego and candy stumbling blocks. This was actually a pretty ingenious plan, as it ensured that there were large parts of the cake that the parents would refuse to touch, as god knows how many filthy and improbable places I've found little lego men.



Oh, and besides cakes, look what else Lisa made:

A somewhat maudlin post about superheroes

It was the first day back at school for Conor, after missing almost two weeks recovering from his -ectomies (tonsil and adenoid). He told me the best part of the day was when his teacher noticed that he was back (I think he was somewhat worried that no-one would). It was also the last day of music at Finn's preschool, which caused no small amount of anxiety the night before. Lisa sagely noted that there are lot of big changes going on for the boys, and for Finn in particular - new room, new sister, new school coming up (for Finn), and the consequent leaving behind of his friends at his old school. I think that I sometimes forget how powerless one is as a little kid, and how utterly scary that can be. It's probably one of the reasons that kids love big, powerful, dangerous things, things that can't be pushed around - monster trucks and dinosaurs and superheroes. I'm fairly certain that if Superman's parents told him that he was having a little sister, he could have reversed the world's rotation to go back in time and stop that from happening, and in the process ensure that he'd have at least a couple more music sessions with Jingle Jeff at preschool.

So as a tribute to the superheroes that my older son loves, and in recognition of their fairly heroic acceptance of the inevitability of the arrival of a sibling and all of the changes that are coming, I'm attaching a photo of some spiderman cupcakes that Lisa made a few months ago for the son of a friend's sister. Next time, less maudlin.