Birthday Cake Quotes

“Why this candle?
Why this cake?
The day of my birth
is not today.
I was born
when you said, 'Hey.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“My birthday cake was her latest project because it was not from a mix but instead built from scratch- the flour, the baking soda, lemon-flavored because at eight that had been my request; I had developed a strong love for sour. We'd looked through several cookbooks together to find just the right one, and the smell in the kitchen was overpoweringly pleasant. To be clear: the bite I ate was delicious. Warm citrus-baked batter lightness enfolded by cool deep dark swirled sugar.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“You can tell you're getting old when the heat blast from your birthday cake candles feels hotter than the surface of the sun.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Saturday is birthday cake day.
During the week, the panadería is all strong coffee and pan dulce. But on weekends, it's sprinkle cookies and pink cake. By ten or eleven this morning, we'll get the first rush of mothers picking up yellow boxes in between buying balloons and paper streamers.
In the back kitchen, my father hums along with the radio as he shapes the pastry rounds of ojos de buey, the centers giving off the smell of orange and coconut. It may be so early the birds haven't even started up yet, but with enough of my mother's coffee and Mariachi Los Camperos, my father is as awake as if it were afternoon.
While he fills the bakery cases, my mother does the delicate work of hollowing out the piñata cakes, and when her back is turned, I rake my fingers through the sprinkle canisters. During open hours, most of my work is filling bakery boxes and ringing up customers (when it's busy) or washing dishes and windexing the glass cases (when it's not). But on birthday cake days, we're busy enough that I get to slide sheet cakes from the oven and cover them in pink frosting and tiny round nonpareils, like they're giant circus-animal cookies. I get to press hundreds-and-thousands into the galletas de grajea, the round, rainbow-sprinkle-covered cookies that were my favorite when I was five.
My mother finishes hollowing two cake halves, fills them with candy- green, yellow, and pink this time- and puts them back together. Her piñatas are half our Saturday cake orders, both birthday girls and grandfathers delighting at the moment of seeing M&M's or gummy worms spill out. She covers them with sugar-paste ruffles or coconut to look like the tiny paper flags on a piñata, or frosting and a million rainbow sprinkles.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food & Love

“I wonder, just for a second, how it will taste on Gael's tongue, the cinnamon and chile en polvo laced into our vanilla cake, the spice a little like what he adds to his family's tamales.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food & Love

“The existence of birthday cake ice cream suggests that we can no longer distinguish celebration foods from everyday ones. We are also not too sure whether we are children or adults.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Her magic was as blunt as she was: like a nuke hidden in a birthday cake.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Dead Take the A Train

“The birthday party was me and her, a whore friend of hers and her pimp, and the cake.”
― Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: Monograph

“On the kitchen counter, she'd set out the ingredients: Flour bag, sugar box, two brown eggs nestled in the grooves between tiles. A yellow block of butter blurring at the edges. A shallow glass bowl of lemon peel. I toured the row. This was the week of my ninth birthday, and it had been a long day at school of cursive lessons, which I hated, and playground yelling about point scoring, and the sunlit kitchen and my warm-eyed mother were welcome arms, open. I dipped a finger into the wax baggie of brown-sugar crystals, murmured yes, please, yes.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“Gus Simpson adored birthday cake.
Chocolate, coconut, lemon, strawberry, vanilla- she had a particular fondness for the classics. Even though she experimented with new flavors and frostings, drizzling with syrups and artfully arranging hibiscus petals, Gus more often took the retro route with piped-on flowers or a flash of candy sprinkles across the iced top. Because birthday cake was really about nostalgia, she knew, about reaching in and using the senses to remember one perfect childhood moment.
After twelve years as a host on the CookingChannel- and with three successful shows to her credit- Gus had made many desserts in her kitchen studios, from her creamy white chocolate mousse to her luscious peach torte, her gooey caramel apple cobbler and her decadent bourbon pecan pie.”
― Kate Jacobs, Comfort Food

“It’s not birthday cake in itself that is the problem. It’s the surrounding culture of food, where sweet treats are ever-present, consumed without ceremony.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“There were mini Vienna hot dogs with all the classic Chicago toppings. A macaroni 'n' cheese bar with all kinds of fun add-ins. Cold sesame noodles in tiny white cardboard Chinese take-out containers, sliders served with small cones of skinny fries. Fried chicken legs, barbecued ribs, mini gyros in tiny three-inch pitas. All of it the most delicious and perfectly prepared elevated junk food, complete heaven, and just what I love. She gave us each a bamboo tray with a piece of parchment paper on it to use as plates, and large kitchen tea towels instead of napkins. There were cold beers in a tub, endless bottles of rosé, and a massive birthday cake, chocolate with fluffy vanilla frosting, and rainbow sprinkles. And then, after coffee, mini ice-cream sandwiches on chocolate chip cookies.”
― Stacey Ballis, Recipe for Disaster

“She was a master cake baker and her creations were not just oohed and ahhed over by other kids at my birthday parties, but requested by those kid's mothers for their own celebrations... She not only accepted any request I made, but far exceeded my own ideas as to how it might look. She was an artist who sculpted in cake and painted in frosting.”
― Lorna Landvik, Chronicles of a Radical Hag

“He grinned at me over the giant tiered cake in his arms- over the twenty-one sparkling candles lighting up his face.

Cassian clapped me on the shoulder. 'You thought you could sneak it past us, didn't you?'

I groaned. 'You're all insufferable.'

Elain floated to my side. 'Happy birthday, Feyre.'

My friends- my family- echoed the words as Rhys set the cake on the low-lying table before the fire. I glanced toward my sister. 'Did you...?'

A nod from Elain. 'Nuala did the decorating, though.'

It was then that I realised what the three different tiers had been painted to look like.

On the top: flowers. In the middle: flames.

And on the bottom, widest layer... stars.

The same design of the chest of drawers I'd once painted in that dilapidated cottage. One for each of us- each sister. Those stars and moons sent to me, my mind, by my mate, long before we'd ever met.

'I asked Nuala to do it in that order,' Elain said as the others gathered round. 'Because you're the foundation, the one who lifts us. You always have been.'

My throat tightened unbearably, and I squeezed her hand in answer.

Mor, Cauldron bless her, shouted, 'Make a wish and let us get to the presents!”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Frost and Starlight