Half birthdays

When I was growing up, my parents started the tradition of celebrating half birthdays with my sister and me.  I think the celebration came about when, as rather small children, we found the wait in between our actual birthdays to be just too long.  So we started baking round cakes that we would cut in half and then enjoy as a half birthday celebration.  Conveniently, my sister and I each had a very good friend (sisters themselves) with birthdays at the same time as us.  Big sister S was 3 days older than me and her little sister E was 1 day younger than my sister.  So we would make a full cake, cut it in half, share one half with their family, and keep the other for ourselves. 

My parents still like to celebrate half birthdays with us, most notably last year when they showed up at my house with half a cake they had actually purchased in that form (apparently Weaver Street Market will sell you half a cake.... who knew?) and completely surprised me. I had forgotten it was in fact my 33.5th birthday, and as a busy mom to young kids and thus little attention ever actually on me, I was especially touched by the surprise. 

Dash's one and a half birthday rolled around last week, and I think the spirit of summer overtook me in my planning as I made the day an even bigger deal than his actual birthday.  I took the day off work!  We went all the way to Raleigh to the super awesome children's museum!  We had lunch out with Josh!  We had a full-on dinner party on the porch that evening with friends and family!  And, of course, we had cake!

Since we have no friends with perfectly timed half birthdays to his, I had the conundrum of how to bake half a cake from, well, pretty much all cake recipes intended to be full cakes.  I finally settled on baking one cake round (which I then cut in half to make a half-moon half cake), and then making mini cupcakes with the rest of the batter to freeze for future moments of extreme chocolate need.  The half cake was adorable and the half birthday boy quite enjoyed that we all sang happy half birthday to him.  We sang it several times in fact since every time we stopped, he grinned, clapped, and said "Mo! Mo!"

The half birthday boy

Half birthday fun at Marbles Museum in Raleigh