My Best Isn't What I Want It To Be

Every time one of my children has a birthday, I imagine the birthday cake I'm going to make, and it's lovely.

Then I make it, and it isn't.

Oh, the cakes are usually okay, but they aren't lovely. Sometimes they aren't even special. They're just cakes.

This year I stepped toward My Girl's 15th, I knew my weakness. I wasn't going to make anything special, just a cake.

And slowly I got sucked into the same spiral: I started looking for a recipe (because my traditional carrot cake with cream cheese icing doesn't work quite as well here as it does in Canada). And I found one. And it was more than a recipe. It was inspiration.

Six layers of rich dark chocolate filled with luscious Swiss meringue butter cream icing, and covered, top and sides, with thick ruffles of the same icing. Beautiful.

I knew there was no way I was going to make it look like the picture, but I thought I could still make it good.

So I started baking. Borrowing pans to make all those layers. Googling icing recipes, since the Swiss meringue buttercream wasn't really an option.

And the layers were beautiful, but there was no way there were going to be six of them.  All my baking resulted in four layers, but at the time of assembly, one suffered a sad fate, and I was left with three. Still, three layers of wonderfully moist rich dark chocolate cake? Not too bad.

And then, once the icing was over the cake, it didn't look nearly as wonderful as it was meant to.  And I was, once again, disappointed.

Why do I set myself up for this? Every year I think it will be different. And every year it's the same: high hopes which, like my fourth layer of cake, suffer a sad fate.

This cake was supposed to be different. I wanted it to be different. My Girl's 15th was going to be special, even if it wasn't a traditional South American 15th. And I'd hung my hopes on the cake.

A bit of consulting with my friends started me thinking about chocolate ganache. One of my friends came over and walked me through the surprisingly simple process of making the exotic-sounding ganache, and the transformation had begun. A bit more advice, four women in my kitchen, all embellishments considered, and the transformation was complete.

No longer a sad, slightly lumpily iced cake.

This was now a treasure.

This was the cake I'd waited my whole life to make.

Sure there were imperfections. Lumps beneath the ganache don't simply disappear. Slightly slanted layers from a slightly non-level oven can't be magically made symmetrical.  

But that's okay. I don't even mind. 

I love this cake. 

I love it for what it represents:

My Girl; team-work; restoration; hope; beauty out of what was considered lost; my imperfect-best made more lovely by those in my life.

Happy Birthday!

I am a mother.  And the child who gave me that role is a young woman, blossoming and stretching to fill the place the Lord has given her.

How does a mother describe her first born child? What words would capture that one's place in a mother-heart and still be believable to those who listen?

This woman-child, this gift from Above, this precious life-filled daughter of mine turns 15 today. Fifteen. Can it be? So soon? And at the same time, only fifteen? Her influence on me has permeated all of who I am, and to realize that it has really only been fifteen years, just over a third of my life, that I've shared with her fills me with amazement.

I was challenged in choosing how to address this, her birthday, in writing. Because it is about her. But it's also about me. Our lives are intertwined in a precious way, and as she grows and matures and prepares for adulthood, our lives will continue to twine together. The twining will just look different than it did as a child.

She is My Girl, the one who brought me a new identity fifteen years ago, who continues to shape my life and my dreams, who is becoming a friend and companion. More than that, though, she is His girl, and He is the One shaping her life.