Birthday Cakes for Peace

I started baking birthday cakes. Then they wanted to be more.

I’m baking birthday cakes for you. Yes, you. These cakes are for anyone and everyone who wants or needs a birthday cake. They are my figurative gift, sweet spins of frosting and delightful things, a respite from reality. For you.

I’m learning again these days, that my kitchen has so much more potential than I thought I understood. I’m finding that instead of being stranded and sinking in the quicksands of despair, fear and outrage, while witnessing another genocide amidst all the other threats + crises - and feeling absolute helplessness to do anything about any of it, I can instead, stand in my kitchen with its unquivering view and bake, breath and give back.

What’s emerging are layers of sponge and all the things that make birthday cakes beautiful, delicious, sometimes ridiculous, light and lovely - while playing with flavor, scent, taste, textures, colors, delight. I’m making all the parts I never knew how to make before - citrus curds, jellied fruits, buttercreams, jams. Spun sugars, marmalades, infused syrups, creams. A piping bag and offset spatulas have a place now in my messy drawer. Never in my wildest dreams. But here I/we are. Beyond our wildest nightmares.

Layers of vanilla sponge with blood orange syrup, pink bergamot cream, topped with some drippy-dippy blood orange curd + candied peel.

So I bake and then post these birthday cakes to my IG account as offering and a muse with a message:

This birthday cake is for you. Anyone and everyone who wants or needs one.

I am so glad you were born. Whoever you are.

I am so glad we are here. Wherever you are.

Make a wish. Peace.

I started baking birthday cakes not knowing what they were or where they would lead. I only know that I cook when I don’t know what else to do. Birthday cake is one simple, humble expression for taking care in a world that’s gone upside down. They are my practice of keeping my sanity by believing in humanity + sharing some sweetness, light + loveliness.

These sometimes-lopsided and sometimes-otherwise home-baked cakes don’t travel much farther than to my neighbors’ homes. I’m no professional baker. They’re not for sale, there’s no shipping of cakes. For me, this is about being present. Of sending out good will + intention and making connection. Of participating in a positive collective (sub)consciousness. This is about creating and releasing some joy, care, and wonder into the world.

I take great pleasure baking a birthday cake and putting it out there even if don’t know that someone. After I’ve posted it on IG, I’ll make a wish and have a slice. Then it’s here in my kitchen to share with neighbors and the wanderers, travelers and troubadours who find their way to our home. If there are cake-leftovers they’ll be wrapped for the freezer for the next visitor. And I get to bake another.

A slice of Heidjertorte, a lingonberry buckwheat cream torte. This recipe is from @wednesdaychef Luisa Weiss’ cookbook, Classic German Baking.

But there’s been a shift. The birthday cakes want to be more.

So #BirthdayCakesforPeace is now a nascent fundraiser, launched today. My current goal is to raise $1,000 for World Central Kitchen. WCK is a first responders organization that provides meals in response to humanitarian, climate, and community crises like the war in Ukraine.

If you see a #birthdaycakesforpeace on my IG and want to give to WCK you can find the link in my bio. No donation is too small. You can give in honor of your birthday, or someone else’s, or someone-anyone’s. Or just because you’re down with the cake-intentions too. Or pass it along. But the best-maybe is that maybe you’ll come along for the joy-ride and bake your own #birthdaycakesforpeace too?

Because I have questions and none of the answers. Starting with: Could this be more?

Could #BirthdayCakesforPeace catch on and raise more more money, more care, more peace? I have no idea. Maybe it’s just this quirky little thing out of my home kitchen and that’s all it’s meant to be and that’s perfect. Or it’s something else. I’m good with all of it. I’m happy baking.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas and potential collaborations. From bakers-far-and-wide, artists, storytellers, activists, organizers…whoever you are + whatever your creative powers, maybe collectively we can do more to make more peace?

Thanks so much. Yours in Peace + Birthday Cakes ~ ali

“I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war’s fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all the possible skill, delicacy, and ever-increasing enjoyment. And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves. Then Fate, even tangled as it is with cold wars as well as hot, cannot harm us.”

~ M.F.K. Fisher, the conclusion of her 1942 wartime book How To Cook A Wolf.