Eating Two Birthday Cakes Within A Day

By nature, I am not excited to celebrate my birthday, nor others'. Maybe it is due to my family who seldom emphasized the yearly event of each member. And the sole memory of my childhood birthday celebrations was that all of us would have soup mee suah (fine wheat noodles with a smooth texture) with a hard-boiled egg for dinner, one of the dishes I disliked most when I was small. The nightmare was that the birthday star would have to swallow two eggs of that kind! Hence I did not look forward to any celebrations at all.

Growing older, I began to give a present or at least convey a greeting to others on their birthdays. But if you never hear anything from me, do not feel that you are not important to me, because even though I love Ernest, Nicole and my late father so much, I hardly remember their date of birth.

During David's birthday celebration, Paul commented that he preferred butter cakes topped with chocolate to pure chocolate cakes. When I learnt that Agape Care Centre no longer sold cakes based on orders, I decided to bake one by myself so that he and Matthew, born in February, would still have a homemade cake to cut. I took Siew Hong's suggestion to look for recipes on the Internet and found a simple one.

The last Friday of February was a public holiday. I got up early to conduct my experiment, baking the first birthday cake in my life. Despite a minor modification of the recipe, the result was satisfactory apparently.

I went to my former colleague Shiv's house first. She had SMS-ed me the previous night to invite me for morning tea. She was celebrating her 64th birthday. As the youngest among the five guests who were mostly retirees, I was however not bored with conversations of senior citizens. Shiv who had suffered numerous bone fractures since recent years was glad to be surrounded by her sons and friends who paid her regular visits.

Once I had sung the birthday song for her and had a share of her birthday cake,
I rushed to Calvary Care Home (CCH) which happened to be near Shiv's house. Actually my appointment there was for a drama practice. Nobody knew I was going to bring a birthday cake though I had given Paul and Matthew their presents earlier and said "Happy Birthday" to these two boys who had officially turned 13 and 14 years old on their respective birthdays.

Most of the CCH boys liked my butter cake more than the one I had ordered from ACC. I asked the soon-to-be March birthday boy about his taste. He answered, "Like this but with a layer of chocolate in the middle."

Hey, boys! You're getting more and more demanding, aren't you?