A New Year literally means a new year for me.  My birthday is January 3^rd.  I know a lot of people like to start off a new year with a cleanse, the detoxifying process of starting the body fresh, free from digestive irritants and maybe a few pounds too.  I’ve never done a professional cleanse; I’m not sure it’s for me.  I have a husband that’s been purifying the family via organic food for a year now so I don’t know what’s left to do, except my birthday cake.

We always get the Duncan Hines butter-recipe yellow cake mix.  We frost it with Betty Crocker chocolate frosting.  I add real butter, the secret fresh ingredient in the cake, so delicious.  It’s my favorite combination, yellow cake with chocolate frosting.  I’ve been eating it since I was at least 10 years old.  Retro cake, as we’ve come to call it, is so yummy and easy, the birthday standard.  We trade off making it for each other, or at least decorating.  The kids always get the decorating job.  An inch of sprinkles and colorful, decorative frosting top every cake.

With health-nut hubby planting food-purification messages in my head, I began to reevaluate our cake mix. I’m a good baker and a little help from the cake-mix factory ensures a nice cake on my birthday.  Over the years, each cake I took out of the oven was more and more perfect, so springy.  I’m just not that good.  I began to wonder whether the ingredients in the cake mix were the same for a dish sponge, just a chemical-compound degree difference.  They looked so similar.

So, this new year I’m starting with a cleanse after all. I dumped the cake mix and canned frosting and went for 100% scratch birthday cake.  That’s easy; I’m not making the cake.  Purification Monitor, hubby, Googled a yellow cake recipe.  He tried for frosting and got lost in the choices.  I go in for the assist.  I grabbed the Hershey’s cocoa box and told him to follow the recipe for frosting.  I dug out the ancient Betty Crocker cookbook for a simple yellow cake recipe.  He settled on my frosting suggestion and HIS yellow cake recipe, calling for EIGHT egg yolks. (His recipe had ratings; my 1960s cookbook did not.)  My birthday pound cake was going to be born, chemical free, nevertheless.

I can bake a lot of things, but I can never get a nice cake from scratch.  Hence, I have a cake-mix habit.  I was really wondering how my husband was going to pull this off.  He took a risk, handing the job to my thirteen-year old who barely cooks eggs or flips a pancake.  “You can read directions.  Just follow the recipe,” he encourages my son.  He leaves for the roof, to take the Christmas lights down.  I’m left to supervise.

Some people are cooks and some people are bakers.  Cooks don’t measure and bakers do.  My youngest son measures and follows EXACTLY what the recipe says, like beat each egg yolk in one at a time.  Well this is a drag if you are making birthday pound cake with EIGHT egg yolks.  I feel his pain.  I’m a baker, but the eggs, one dump if I was mixing the batter.  So, it seems my husband enlisted the right person for the job.

I didn’t help much.  My son pulls out three cake pans and asks which one is best.  I told him he needed two of the same.  He needed help greasing.  I told him to melt a little butter in a dish, use the blue pastry brush to brush the butter all over the pan.  “Oh you mean paint the pan?”  I got nostalgic.  Those were the words I used when the guys were preschoolers and we baked together.  “Yes.  Paint the pan.”  I taught him how to flour the pan, over the sink not the cooktop.  I told him where to place the cakes in the oven to bake properly.  The ipad locked up so we guessed on the baking time.  My old test was to touch the top.  If it sprang back, it was done.  With a chemical-free pound cake, I realized a little late this would not happen.  The old-fashioned toothpick tester worked fine, clean as a whistle. FYI, yellow cake from scratch is not very yellow.

He made the frosting, step-by-step.  He tasted it and said it was the best frosting ever; it was.  My baker stopped.  “I can’t frost a cake.  It always rips.”  So, we enlisted the creative cook, my older son to put the icing on the cake and the icing on the icing.  He recently received a cap with Keith Haring’s “Friends” graphic and thus served as inspiration for the decoration, Rasta style.  We were out of blue icing.

We all started our new year with a birthday cake cleanse.  The masterpiece was truly scrumptious and organic.  I feel better already.  My husband does too.  “What do we have left,” he asked.  “I can’t think of anything,” I replied as I crunched down on a Nacho Cheese Dorito leftover from the boys’ New Year’s treat.

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