I LOVE birthdays in our family and not for the obvious reasons.
It's because my wife makes and invents great cakes. They're not ordinary cakes. Her recipes are delicious and I'm always encouraging her to produce a book. She uses healthy ingredients - or as healthy as can be for cake-making - and so I can indulge happily without any feelings of guilt or concerns about eating the 'wrong' stuff.
In fact, we encourage our kids to eat Jamie's cakes, which are full of protein, fruits, healthy fats and no cholesterol. She uses goji berries, cashew nuts, coconut cream and butter, dates (instead of sugar), strawberries, pumpkin seeds, spirulina, nuts etc.
For Zenchai's sixth birthday, she produced one of her finest. Zenchai asked for strawberry, vanilla and chocolate and that's precisely what he got.
Nothing was cooked. And yet it looked - and tasted - like a dream. One of the best ever. The cake lasted more than two days. We had some for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Before Zenchai's birthday was over, Jamie was asking me what cake I would like for my birthday (two months down the road) - she's hinting at a durian one, by the way.
That's either devotion or obsession. Jamie likes to eat her own cakes, but possibly not as much as she enjoys making them.
Zenchai genuinely enjoyed his day. Last year it was in Brazil and, the year before, Ecuador. But he told me the day after that he'd like to spend his next birthday in Thailand. We indulged him in all the things he enjoyed. We took him to his favourite restaurant for lunch - Punpun - where he wanted potato naan and a fresh coconut/cinnamon smoothie. He played all day with his new toys, we took a trip to feed some giraffes at the Night Safari and then topped things off at The Centre Of The Universe, an outdoor salt water swimming complex.
After that, we returned home, as it was dark, cooked Zenchai his favourite mashed potatoes, read him some stories and put him to bed.
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