Threenage wasteland.
On December 20, 2020, our Rosie turned three!
You may recall from my last post that we were in Kansas City for the holidays, and I loved that we could spend Rosie’s birthday with so much of my family. Even if she hated hearing everyone sing “happy birthday.”
Thankfully she stuck around to make a wish.
I wasn’t feeling up for making another birthday cake after the project we took on for her Chicago celebration, so I asked my mom to order one from our favorite luncheonette and bakery in Kansas City, Andre’s Confiserie Suisse. Rose loves “bobbies” (berries), so we thought the raspberry chocolate would be perfect. I think we all expected to love it, but it actually wasn’t very flavorful!
The dark horse was the birthday cake Aunt Janie brought, which was a good old-fashioned homemade chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting, and a big sparkly “3!” Maybe she felt we would need a backup, given the history of dry chocolate cakes for poor Rosie’s birthday. Anyway, her homemade cake was so much better than the Andre’s cake! I felt ashamed when the Andre’s cake was completely eaten with only a bit taken out of Janie’s - we should have trusted that her heartfelt efforts would prevail with big chocolate flavor. The only bright side to our initial preference for the Andre’s cake was that we had Aunt Janie’s to snack on for the rest of the week.
While I ate my humble pie (and more of Janie’s cake), Rose festooned herself with stickers featuring her new age!
Evening comes early on those shorty short days of the year, and after opening presents, it was time for dinner.
Pizza is the quintessential birthday party food for me, so I asked my parents where we could get a good pie nearby their place on the Plaza. They recommended Pizza 51, which is just across Volker on the UMKC campus.
We ordered two gigantic pizzas for our crowd - the first was the “Highway Special.” It’s essentially a supreme pizza, topped with pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, green bell peppers, onions, and black olives. We are eaters of supreme pizza in my family, and I thought this one edged out the other one we ordered, the “Cowtown Lovers.” More of less a meat-lovers, this combo of pepperoni, sausage, beef, and Canadian bacon did have lovely texture, especially with the crispy sausage on time.
The birthday girl couldn’t wait to get her hands on some!
What a lovely, chaotic birthday celebration we had for Rosebud’s third! As much as I loved that Rose had a birthday cake from a place so special to us as Andre’s, I think they are better at other things (like rumballs and mocha roulades). What was really special was our homemade cake from Aunt Janie, sugar-fueled toddlers running around with big slices of pizza, and the grownups who made it all possible. Thank you to Mom and Dad for hosting and to everyone who always makes our girl feel so loved on her big day!
Caroline
