Birthday celebration at camp

July 30, 2009 by Barbara.

I went out to an event called Blog Out Loud Ottawa last Thursday night. It was as fun and interesting as it was poorly timed for me. I left an hour before it wrapped up to bake cupcakes for Reid to take to celebrate her birthday at camp. I planned for her to attend camp at her school this week so that she’d be able bring the cupcakes - every time one of the other kids brought something during the school year, Reid had asked if she’d be able to do so, too. All this being said, I left and caught a bus in a strange part of town but still made it home within the hour. Except the “hour” was 10:00 and I rarely stay up past 9:00 and, lately, have fallen asleep with Reid by 8:00.

I located the vegan cake recipe on the Instructables web site on the way home, just in case I was missing any ingredients. In addition to answering the “no eggs, no milk, no nuts” requirements for bringing food to school, it is a scrumptious chocolate cake that is super-easy to make. I made 32 mini-cupcakes, thinking the kids would like to have a couple each. One didn’t come out as it was supposed to and so I had to eat it. 31 wasn’t as good a number but I was too tired to make more. I did wait until they’d cooled completely before trying to take any others out of their spots. I piled them artfully on the base of my cake taker and sprinkled them with icing sugar. It looked pretty and was much less fiddly (not to mention faster) than icing a those mini cupcakes. Plus, my soy margarine has milk solids in it and it was too late to buy anything else for the frosting. Mostly I was going with the prettiness of the sugar dusting.  When I showed Reid in the morning, though, all of the icing sugar had been absorbed by the cupcakes. They were just too moist!

I’d promised Reid that I’d buy a candle in the shape of a “5″ but forget to do it. On Friday morning, I told Reid about my mistake and said we’d stop at the Metro on the way to camp. They had one “5″ candle on their rack but it was broke into two pieces. We checked at the Zellers and Food Basics in the same mall but they were both closed. Finally, I told Reid that we could wait and * maybe* find one at one of the other stores or she could use the five stick candles that we’d brought. Reid thought a moment and then said, “We should go to camp now, right, Mama.” I agreed that we should and we did. I was proud of her reasonableness in the face of disappointment. Maybe 5 is different than 4 (though she has been increasingly able to manage her disappointments over the last while).

After school on Friday, Reid reported that the kids and teachers had sung “Happy Birthday” and “Bonne fête”. They’d all had a cupcake but Reid said that none of the kids got a second one. I didn’t think to ask if she liked hers but, now that I know she didn’t eat her birthday cake or birthday pie, I probably should.

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