Memory Monday – Birthday Edition

This week it’s my birthday week.

And I’m spending it almost the way I wanted it. With my family. Although we’re not able to sit down at the dinner table all at once, or stay too close to each other, I am happy that they are all here to spend time with me, and they are all relatively healthy.

When I was a kid, my parents and my sister would wake me up first thing in the morning and sing the Danish birthday song. Then I would get presents and breakfast in bed. Breakfast was usually one of my moms homemade rolls with butter and hot chocolate. There would be Danish flags in the rolls and sometimes a tiny flag on the tray as well.

Birthdays in my family was usually a pretty big thing when it came to family. All the aunts and uncles and grandparents would come over. Either for coffee, rolls and cakes in the afternoon or evening, or later on for dinner.

Usually there would be a ‘cake man’. Which is a baking tray sized, person shaped cake made out of puff pastry and decorated with icing and candy.

Now, the tradition was/is that the cake man would be beheaded while everyone screams (writing this down, I realize that is really morbid and strange, but back then, it was just something you did. I have no idea why that’s the tradition. Something to look into….)

And there would usually also be a layered cake of some sort. The Danish version of a layered cake is a very thin, light cake (3 layers) assembled with either a custard or a berry mousse and covered with either icing or whipped cream. Or one or two layers of same cake, chocolate flavored whipped cream in between the layers and the top, which would be made out of meringue. Now that’s delicious! But also very sweet. Hurts my teeth just thinking about it.

Anyways. So yes, my birthday this year is very different from the previous ones, but it’s still going to be a memorable birthday.

Thumbnail Photo by Mikael Seegen on Unsplash