Today is Alex's birthday, and what birthday would be complete without a fantastic birthday cake to round out the day? I've always been obsessed with birthday cake, especially as a child. Since my birthday is close to Halloween, my mom always threw these huge halloween-themed parties with twenty-something kids invited and made these huge sheet cakes for each one. I remember having a graveyard cake one year with the cream cheese cookies that looked like graves and oreo crumbs to look like dirt, and gummy worms to look like... worms. I was probably about six, and dressed up like the wicked queen from Snow White, and I have this picture of me with makeup on my face and a crown on my head eating cake with my fingers with lots of frosting on my face and in my hair... Good times. 

Anyways, the cake-eating is not to be blockaded by veganism. In fact, I encourage cake-eating all year round, and hope to one day make a living insisting people buy and eat vegan cakes baked by me. But birthday cakes are special. They are usually tethered to one's specific tastes because it's made specifically for you. Isn't there something great about having someone bake you, specifically, a cake to eat? It's a tradition I actually agree with, and I typically consider myself a very untraditional person. But some traditions were made by people who had it right. Some traditions still make sense and don't harm anyone, and to traditions like that, I say, "I'm for it!"

Alex is a man of specific tastes, and was a hard person to decide what to bake for. I ran through about thirty suggestions as to what I thought would be the best birthday cake ever. But slowly and mercilessly each one was shot down, and my flock of brilliant ideas lay wounded and dying on the floor. So I made a tester birthday cake, or perhaps, a pre-birthday cake, to test the waters and see how it went over. I had high hopes for this one. He tried to be polite but it turned out that it passed with a C- and needed a serious trip back to the drawing board for reorganization. So after several sketches, a blueprint of the approved cake was chosen.  So yesterday afternoon after a long day of cake-planning and ingredient scavenger hunting, I suited up and went into my underground layer that is my kitchen, and three hours later emerged with this winner: