Birthday Cake

May is usually a time of celebrations for us. Both of our birthdays and our wedding anniversary fall in this merry month. While we don't typically have big parties for any of these events, we do generally have a few friends over for a nice dinner and some cake. We understood that for the greater good even our low-key celebrations would have to be toned down this year, so yesterday James' birthday was recognized with a favorite dinner and a small birthday cake for just the two of us. I made what our family refers to as "The Best Chicken in the World" - so named by our only child many years ago. The recipe comes from a small plastic spiral-bound cookbook that I got as a thank-you gift for doing a slide-presentation about Puebla, Mexico to a group in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas about 25 years ago. We blogged about this recipe 6 years ago. You can find the post here.

The "nueva receta" part of this post comes from the infrequently used Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook which has nice divider tabs like we used to use in our loose-leaf binders.

I found the tab for "Cakes" and selected "Busy-Day Cake", although yesterday wasn't so much a busy day, as a we- have-all-the-ingredients-for-this-and-we-ain't-going-to-the-store-day.

The only change I made to this was that I used a 9-inch round cake pan instead of a 9-inch square pan. We apparently do not own the requisite square sized pan.

I also made cream-cheese frosting from the same cookbook, under the same tab.

I should also point out that both of these recipes call for the use of an electric mixer. We still don't own one, so the cake and the frosting were mixed using the energy from my arms. 

For a final festive touch I added some multi-colored sprinkles I found in the cabinet. There were no candles though.

A perfect cake for two people. We also still had some ginger ice cream in the freezer which tasted divine with this otherwise basic cake.

Simple recipes from a classic cookbook.

And now, a rant.

When we moved into our house 18 years ago all the houses on our street were occupied by either single people, couples, or families. Now we live between two student rentals. The level of aggravation in dealing with this changes from year-to-year as new students come and go. As it turned out one of our next-door neighbors also had a birthday yesterday and decided to have a biggish party in the backyard complete with ignoring of social-distancing guidelines, loud music, and no masks. They did provide paper party hats to their guests though. The party went on for hours. Police were called. You'd think a house that had a drug bust not so long ago would try to keep a low profile, but you'd be wrong.