cake boss

We decided several years ago that we would stop having "kid" birthday parties at age 10. My son has been fine with that, but for various reasons, I have not held the line as much with my daughter. This year, my daughter became a teenager, and that seems to be a big deal. For me, I always thought of turning 12 as the "big" birthday, since that was the year that you celebrated your -- in my case -- Japanese zodiac sign. It only happens every 12 years, so I was raised to think that that was a pretty big deal. In Japanese (and Japanese American) culture, you get a big celebration after you've traveled around the zodiac wheel five times, on your sixtieth birthday.
My husband, however, did not grow up with that same consciousness about the zodiac years -- even though he will be the first to point out that it is the Chinese zodiac which the Japanese stole and used as their own. Since my daughter was with all of us on a family trip to China on her 12th birthday, she did not get a typical "party," so letting her have a 13th birthday party seemed like it was not caving in too much.
In any case, my daughter usually has big plans for her birthday, even though they tend to evolve during the course of the year. She starts thinking about the next one almost as soon as her birthday is over. Looking back, it's a little sad that we can't remember all of them -- none of us can remember what happened at the 3 or 5 year birthdays. For the others, we've been to Build-a-Bear, learned gymnastics at Golden Bear, gone ice skating at the Oakland Ice Rink, had a virtual + reality party at our house with Webkinz, scaled fake rocks at Ironworks, watched a show and had tea at American Girl Place (just with me, a couple aunties, and my mom), had ice cream at Fenton's and extended family and friends parties at home.
"What do you want to do for your birthday, Mika?" I asked a little over a week ago.
"Uhhhh ... I want to go to Homeroom Mac+Cheese, and then maybe a sleepover."
"Okay, you realize you can only invite a few friends, especially if it's a sleepover. Who do you want to invite?"
"Oh. Hmmmm. That's sooooo hard," my daughter groaned. It was hard. Not wanting to offend anybody, yet knowing there was no way she could invite everybody she wanted to, we made a very short list and went from there. We were already very late, sending out an electronic invitation on Monday for the party on Friday. Fortunately, everybody was able to make it for at least the cake & ice cream portion of the evening, and most could even spend the night.
Since Homeroom does not take reservations, and standing out on the corner with a bunch of girls for an hour to wait for a table was not my idea of a good party, I was relieved to discover that the restaurant made party portions to go. I ordered the Gilroy Garlic and the Mack the Goat macaroni & cheese dishes, plus an order of Minty, Buttery Peas, at my daughter's request. (She is not a person who likes peas, but she loves these peas. As she says, "They must put fairy dust on them. Or nicotine. They are so addictive.")
With a phone call, dinner was taken care of. Now came the tricky part. My daughter had been asking for a Funfetti cake for months now. For those of you not familiar with Funfetti, it is a boxed cake mix that has little "confetti" sprinkles in the white cake. She also wanted chocolate frosting. This didn't sound too hard, but I was not entirely sure how I was going to execute this birthday request. Messing up on the birthday cake would be pretty bad. Okay, worse than pretty bad: it would be a birthday disaster. I decided to attempt making chocolate frosting from scratch -- I'm not sure why I thought this would be a good idea, but it seemed like one at the time.
Grocery shopping done, I unboxed my newly-released-from-the-storage-unit stand mixer and got it ready for battle. First, the cake mix. I felt like a TV chef with my barely broken-in stand mixer, adding ingredients as it mixed away. It was like magic. I poured the batter into the dusted pan and set the timer.
I cleaned frantically while the cake baked, then came running when the timer beckoned. Stuck a toothpick in it to check for doneness and let it cool. After a while, I decided to flip it onto my foil-covered cutting board so I could get ready to frost it. Oops. A large crack opened up, and then I suddenly had two pieces of birthday cake. I jigsaw puzzled them together and stared. Maybe if I looked at it long enough, the cake would miraculously heal itself. Heal thyself! Sigh. It wasn't working. Besides, the cake was not only broken, it was very flat. I decided to add a layer of cake, but realized I had no other cake mix. I thought about making a brownie layer, since I have six different boxes of brownie mix, but then had an inspiration: ice cream cake. Ice cream, check. M&Ms, check. Now, a little melting time to soften up the ice cream, a little muscle to spread it around in the cake pan, a sprinkling of M&Ms, and then ... a little bit of luck in getting the cake layer back into the pan ... and into the freezer it went.
Now it was time to make the frosting. I fired up the mixer again, and threw in lots of butter, some cocoa, a splash of vanilla, and some milk, and suddenly I had chocolate frosting! I had never used frosting that I hadn't bought at the grocery store, so it was a revelation to me that it was actually not that difficult to make. While I had been mixing, girls were arriving and I couldn't hear the doorbell, the dog barking, or the daughter opening the door. They eventually all arrived and sat down for dinner, eating far less food than I had planned for, and sounding happy the whole time. The bits and pieces of conversation I heard had to do with teachers, school, and times when they had heard other students fart at school. After they finished eating, they scurried away to the family room, where I had put twelve bottles of Hello Kitty nail polish out, and the girls paired up and did to do each other's nails.
Dinner was past history, and it was time for me to work on the cake again.
I filled a large roasting pan with hot water and dipped the ice cream cake pan into it for a short time. Then, imitating the motion my mother uses when plating a pan of gyoza, I flipped the cake onto my foil covered cutting board and ... exhaled when I took off the pan and discovered that the cake actually looked pretty good! The ice cream had molded itself into what looked like a layer of vanilla ice cream ganache, smooth and seamless, nearly encasing the broken Funfetti cake inside of it. Back to the freezer it went. When the final party guest arrived, I set to work frosting the cake. I had no pastry bag, so I clipped a Ziplock bag and went for it. Why, oh why, did I not take classes at Cake Dec like my sister did? What the heck am I doing? I shoved the words of doubt down to where I could barely hear them, and starting piping a ribbon of chocolate frosting along the edge, hiding the glimpses of cake from view. I was doing pretty well until the cake started melting. "It's almost cake time!" I shouted to the girls and my husband. I needed some help, now. "What do you need?" asked my husband. "Can you put the candles on the cake? They are right here, on this counter ... buried in this vicinity somewhere ..." I motioned in a vague circle next to the stand mixer, and run off to find the plastic Japanese letters I had found during some recent unpacking; my kids never used them much, and I knew they would be the perfect finish to personalize the cake with my daughter's name. I dumped the box of plastic letters on the guest bed, fumbling through until I found both a み and a か. There. I ran back to the kitchen, announcing as I ran, "O-kaaay -- cake time! Hurry because it's melting!"
My husband had arranged the HAPPY BIRTHDAY candles perfectly, and I finished off the decorations with the Japanese letters.

"It's Funfetti cake!" my daughter announced to her friends.
"... and it's ice cream cake, too!" I chime in, to explain why I had been running around saying the cake would melt.
The girls watch in anticipation as my husband lights the candles. "Now ... everybody sing, really fast."
Girls sing. A wish is made. Candles are blown out. Cake is served. Girls eat.
"Ooooh, this cake is good!"
"Wait, is this an M&M in here?"
"Whoa, it's an ice cream cake!"
"This is delicious."
Whew! Sigh of relief. I have averted a birthday cake disaster.
But wait, there's more -- my husband breaks out the Ben & Jerry's Schweddy Balls, which he has driven all over town to find, just for this occasion. Schweddy Balls are eaten. My daughter tries to explain the SNL Schweddy Balls skit. Girls chatter amongst themselves.
I look around the table and marvel at all of them. I've known one of the girls since she was 3 years old, and the rest since they were between 5 and 8 years old -- and now, with my daughter passing this milestone, they are all teenagers.
I take a picture, knowing that I will probably forget this birthday party otherwise, even though I really do hope that I always remember this day.
Happy birthday, baby girl.

not quite undercover

 "Mom," my son reported, "I have to bring Chinese doughnuts and soy milk to Mandarin class on Tuesday."

"Oh -- okay. I know what Chinese doughnuts are, I think, but what kind of soy milk is it? Just the regular kind I can get at the grocery store?"

"Uhhhhm, I don't know."

"I'll send the teacher an email," I say, letting him off the hook.

"Okay. Thanks, Mom."

My son is at a distinct disadvantage in Mandarin class, all because his mother is ... Japanese. Most of the kids whose parents aren't immigrants at least have a mother of Chinese ancestry. Except for my son. I think it is a source of amusement for the teacher, since my son has a Chinese surname, and she seems to appreciate my effort to get the food assignments right. She is always careful to try to give us food assignments that we can handle, and explains things to my son as much as possible. This time, I was familiar with half the assignment -- the Chinese doughnuts, which I learned to enjoy because of my love of jook, that savory, soupy, comforting concoction that my roommate, Alice Wong, introduced me to the day after Thanksgiving back in college. Turkey jook. That's what turkey leftovers become in a Chinese American household. And Chinese doughnuts are the perfect partner to a bowl of jook.

The soy milk, though, had me confused. My cousin (actually, my husband's cousin, but I have adopted all of his relatives as my own) told me that there is actually a soy soup that is commonly eaten with the doughnuts, and it is different from the standard soy milk I might buy at Trader Joe's. I emailed the teacher and asked her to send me the name of the type of soy milk, with the Chinese characters, just in case I needed it. 

Okay, who am I kidding? I knew I would need to go straight to the email when I went shopping for this. I walked into the market in Chinatown this morning, holding my phone up tentatively and asking, "Excuse me ... do you have soy milk? Dou Jiang?" I say, in my best invented Mandarin pronunciation. I point at my phone to the characters: 豆浆. The clerk nods her understanding. "Ohhh ... yes, dou jiang. I'm sorry but the delivery is not here yet from San Francisco. They make it fresh everyday. I'm sorry. You can come back later."

I have to explain that I cannot come back later, because I need it by 9:30 am for my son's Mandarin class. Plus, I need Chinese doughnuts, which they will dip into the soy milk. Does she have the kind of soy milk I would dip a Chinese doughnut into?

"Doughnut? In soy milk? Hmmm. Doughnut is very sweet. You don't want sweet soy milk," she gestures as if eating a round, American doughnut.

"Oh -- no, not that kind of doughnut. Chinese doughnut --" I gesture what I think indicates a long, tubular object, "-- like you eat with jook."

"Ahhhh! Okay. Soy milk. Uhmmm, this kind is good."

She directs me to a vacuum sealed box of soy milk with pictures of black beans on it. 

Okay, looks good to me. I scan the nearby shelves to see what else I might want to buy, as long as I'm here, since I don't come to the Chinatown markets very often.

The clerk notices my gaze, and apparently has noticed something else about me, too. "Do you want anything else?" she asks, pointing to the shrink-wrapped confections on the counter, "Do you want some mochi?" she says with a smile, "It's good." 

Of course, mochi. The only Japanese thing around. Try as I might to blend and at least come close to seeming ABC (American Born Chinese), my cover was apparently blown, no need to perpetrate. How did she know? Do I just look Japanese? Whatever the case, I found it amusing. I very politely say, "No, thank you, but they look very good," and make my purchase, thanking her and bowing my head slightly as I leave.

cars that go boom

"It's so embarrassing when Dad drives around with his music blasting," bemoaned my teenaged son. I chuckled and said, "He's been doing that your whole life, and you just noticed it now?"
"No, I noticed it before."
"Oh, okay. He's been doing that your whole life, and you were just never embarrassed by it before."
My son nods, then gives my husband a little credit, "At least he plays the right kind of music most of the time. It's usually some rap song. But sometimes he's like blasting something else --"
"-- yeah, like NPR!" chimes in my tweenaged daughter.
"Yeah! But most of the time, he's, like, this middle-aged Asian man in a suit driving his car boomin' some rap song ..."
I want to say something reassuring, to make them feel a little better about their dad, but all I can manage is this: "Well, he's been doing that pretty much since the day I met him. Although back then, he was a twenty-something year old Asian guy with his car boomin'. At least he's consistent."
What I really want to do is burst out into an impromptu version of Tigra & Bunny singing "We like the cars, the cars that go boom, we're Tigra and Bunny and we like The Boom ..." but since the kids are already bummed out about their embarrassing father, I decide to try to be The Less Embarrassing Parent and keep my mouth shut (and my bootie firmly planted on my chair). I think I am winning in The Less Embarrassing Parent contest; to be fair, I don't think my husband realizes there is any kind of competition going on. (Although, even if he did, I believe I would still be winning.)