My dearest and sweetest Pilar turned 14 this past week. 14. Goodness. She also started the ninth grade. High school.
I feel old, to put it mildly.
I've known Pilar since she was 2. And still in diapers. Our lives careened into one another and we've been stuck like glue ever since. I consider her one of my very best friends. I honestly do.
It's a tradition that I make Pilar's birthday cake for her each year. Sometimes she has so many gatherings and celebrations for her birthday that my cake is just one among many that she has. In fact, this year, Pilar made her own birthday cake for her actual birthday. And when her mother called me to discuss the birthday dinner we were having tonight so she could celebrate her birthday with me and with Dave, she even told me that I was off the hook this year and did not need to make a cake.
Not make a cake? How can I not make a cake? I always make a cake. It just felt too weird not to make a cake. Honestly, it was as if I'd somehow be letting her down. Even though I knew that she'd probably just hug me and tell me that she had made her own cake this year and it was okay that I didn't make her one, I just couldn't do it.
So I told her mother I would make a small cake and bring it to dinner.
I spent today up to my eyeballs in chocolate. Literally. I had chocolate on my eyeballs at one point. Chocolate on your eyeballs, hot melted chocolate on your eyeballs, is not a spa treatment that I recommend any of the rest of you try. Ouch. Double ouch.
Pilar's birthday cake every year has been some sort of chocolate concoction. Tonight we laughed about the one year when I made her a large sheet cake that was decorated to look like a roller rink and had Mickey and Minnie Mouse skating around together. Only on the way to the roller rink where Pilar was actually having her birthday party, our friend Kaeta had been in charge of holding the cake on her lap and by the time it got to the roller rink it had transmorphed into the Loma Prieta cake of 1994. Massive earthquakes had torn the roller rink asunder and whole chunks of cake were now breaking off from the sides. Pilar's mother did her best to "glue" it back together with the copious amounts of frosting, but the damage had already been done and it was forever after referred to as "the earthquake cake". As her mom said tonight, it was a true lesson in learning to just let go.
This year's cake was a six inch 4 layer chocolate chip pound cake with chocolate mousse filling covered in bittersweet chocolate ganache. Enough chocolate to put a woman with raging PMS into a seratonin induced coma that will keep her blissful until long after her period has come and gone.
Despite the chocolate on my eyeballs, the cake did turn out pretty well. The mousse was very light and airy and not too sweet and the ganache finally hardened (I think I was being too impatient with it) and I managed not to get chocolate all over my clothes which I think is a first. Honestly. Usually I end up wearing as much of the chocolate as ends up in the dessert. Dave drove to Pilar's house in Watsonville and I held the cake aloft in my two hands so I could tip and sway along the winding roads assuring that we would not end up with an upside down cake covered in Clyde hair.
Dinner tonight was wonderful. It's been forever and a day since we've had dinner at my "family's" house. I've missed being there. Even Clyde was so glad to be "home". There were a few moments of sadness when our friend Irene learned that she had lost a dear friend in New York and we were all sad both for her and that she had to leave to go home.
Dave and I gave Pilar a set of Tarot cards for her birthday along with a gift certificate for a Tarot reading. She was very excited to have the cards and took them out right away and examined each one carefully. The Star card was a naked woman with dreadlocks. Pilar turned it towards me and said, "Look, it's you, Jen. But then, I've always known you were a star."
Isn't she the best? I just love that girl. I always will.
