
I just finished putting together my birthday cake for tomorrow, and it got me thinking of birthday cakes gone by. The photo above is from 2004, which I think marks the start of the Modern Age of Anna's Birthday Cakes. I have nearly no recollection of what came before that (with a few exceptions, of course), but for my 23rd birthday, I asked my mom to make me a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting -- but with vanilla frosting between the layers. Oh ho! It was clearly still early days for both of us, as far as cakes go; I had thought that that was a comically fussy request, and my mom made a cake that was only two layers tall.
Incidentally, this was also right before I moved to London and right after I'd got my first DLSR (a Nikon D70 that was my birthday gift from Rob). That photo is one of the very first I took with it.

I find it odd that there are no birthday cake photos for 2005 and 2006, although I guess I wasn't quite interested in food photography at that time. I did find a picture of the donuts I had for breakfast in 2006, but this is a birthday cake retrospective, so you'll just have to imagine the two donuts I intended to split and eat halves of, but which I'm fairly certain I devoured whole.
In 2007, I didn't even have a birthday cake (gasp!), because the one I tried to make wound up in the bin. It would have been the first year in my current tradition of making myself a fussy cake, and I had a good concept -- vanilla cake layers with crumbled Oreo pieces baked in, vanilla between the layers, and chocolate on the outside. But the cake was dry, and I tried using powdered sugar frosting, which was horrible and gloopy. I threw it away in frustration and thought about buying a cake instead, but I wound up skipping the whole thing entirely. It was one of my crankier birthdays.
But it gave me a great excuse to throw a half-birthday party the following June, and that's when I made the cake pictured above. I used the recipe for Dorie Greenspan's 'Perfect Party Cake', which really was perfectly light and tender. Vanilla buttercream and rhubarb preserves went between each layer, with more buttercream on the outside. It was a hit. Here's a photo of a single piece, so you can see the layers.

For my 27th birthday, I wanted something that wasn't chocolate. I'm not such a fan of chocolate cake, if there's something else on offer. Ganache, yes, but it seems to me that when it's in the cake itself, it kind of muddies the flavor (makes it too blandly sweet). It's not bad, per se, but it's uninteresting to me -- and not the best use of chocolate.
Anyway, I made a coffee cake for my birthday. It was roughly as tall as a two-layer cake would have been, with streusel running through the middle and on top, but it was baked all as one. There was a bit of overflow while it baked (which wasn't noticeable in the finished product), and I was really worried it would be undercooked in the middle, but it wasn't. I think I basically wanted streusel AND cream cheese frosting (who doesn't?), which I managed by icing the outside. I remember it being a little dry at the edges but it was good, otherwise. No photos of a slice, though, which is disappointing.

And that brings us to last year, 2009. I wanted my favorite elements of a German Chocolate cake (the frosting and coconut/pecan filling) without using chocolate layers, so I made coconut cake instead. After I made the filling, I was pretty much ready to just stick a candle in the bowl and sing Happy Birthday, because it was so, so good. Butter, sugar, toasted coconut, and pecans? Yes, please. The layers didn't quite match up, but when I thawed out the very last pieces of the cake a couple of months ago, I'd just about changed my mind on that.
So, my birthday is tomorrow (twelve22, get it?). Any guesses as to what kind of cake I've made myself this year? The winner gets... the satisfaction of knowing I've et some delicious cake. Granted, that does seem to benefit me a bit more than you, but it's my birthday, after all.