Preparing for a Pandemic Birthday Party (or, Turning Three Score & Ten, Part 1)

I am the old-fashioned kind of hostess who does everything ahead for a party — and the older I get, the earlier the preparations start. For my 70th birthday party, I made a schedule, and started getting the porch, house and food ready the Monday of the party. And because of the Pandemic, I had to do some things farther in advance than that: buy really good paper “hand towels” for the bathroom,  borrow tables to keep us socially-distanced on the porch, figure out safe ways to serve everything. 

The menu, too, I planned ahead — but I am also the kind of cook who changes her mind. This was the planned menu (see Recipes pages for *):

curried shrimp dip*  with potato chips

scallop ceviche* made with passion fruit pulp and limes, served in one Mason jar per family unit

cornbread (normally I make tortillas for ceviche but you can't do them ahead)

big green salad with lots of avocado

cake (of course) & iced decaf coffee or hot tea

“You're not making your own cake, are you?” my boarding school room-mate Wendy once said to a young mother on Coll, sounding horrified. Alison reassured her that she was not. But the Blue Rose Girls, who bake better than their husbands do, have “often” made their own, and, although I considered buying one from a bakery here, I didn't. They looked too professional and tasted too sweet.

I wanted a home-made birthday cake. As I made it, in a yellow outside white inside bowl like the ones my mother had, I remembered licking those bowls (always, with lines down the middle so it would be fair):

It's been a long time since I made a cake and I considered buying one again, but everyone coming loves me and has good manners, too. They'd be polite however the cake turned out. Besides, the main point of birthday cake is the idea of it and blowing out the candles and by that stage of the evening, some people probably wouldn't even notice what the cake tasted like.

However, when the carrot cake layers both came out of the oven completely flat, I was dismayed enough to reconsider — but decided to just make lots and lots of icing. I baked  plenty of cakes as a child, and decided to make my childhood favorite frosting: butter and powdered sugar and plenty of them.  I made about a pound of it and put it and the cake in the refrigerator across the hall.

Sure enough, when I iced the cake a few hours before the party, pecans between the layers and an inch of icing everywhere (between the layers, sides, top) did the trick. I sprinkled the top with real gold baking flakes and then (this is why it's good to do everything you can ahead AND leave lots of extra time the day of the party) spent far longer it should have taken to find candles.  I hadn't thought about them — just assumed I'd have some. I didn't, but 7 tall beeswax tapers were actually prettier than birthday candles. I added them to the piles of plates, cutlery etc. on the dining room table —  the 10 pale yellow nasturtium blossoms  I'd pick and put on the sides just before lighting the candles. 

                        Not the actual cake — but one of the candles and the same kind of flowers

But back to the preparations: the best part of the plan was allotting almost an entire day, two days before the party, to finding everything — plates, serving dishes and utensils, glasses, silver, chairs, the right tablecloths for both tables. Because we would be outside the whole time, I just piled everything on what is normally my dining room table. This included sparklers — I thought it would be fun to light them while we carried in the cake — and, remembering a time when Anna came for my birthday and all the matches were so wet that she wanted to give up on them but the children and I wanted lit candles  — a lighter. 

Because I'd found everything, setting the tables was fun: I put my second favorite dinner plates, silver, and Ikea not crystal wine glasses (I didn't want to be sad if anything broke and glasses often do)  on the Marimekko pink and white oilcoth tablecloth. The smaller table had a gold/yellow/ivory damask table cloth covered with a lace tablecloth; it looked really pretty with 2 round gold trays  — one for champagne glasses and one for the dip and chips.

Then, with the table set and all the food made except a second appetizer (pears, blue cheese, spinach leaves skewered together and sprinkled with walnuts & vinaigrette), I went swimming, even though I hadn't brought the garbage to the dump or bought flowers. 

It is a huge mistake to spend the whole day before a party working and I decided I didn't have time to do either of those tasks. But it was one of those blessed times when things just work out — completely by chance, my downstairs neighbor was going to the dump and asked if I had anything. And an hour before the party, the most beautiful flowers I've ever been given arrived:

It's not chance that they went perfectly with the tablecloth and china. Tom, my friend since he was 15 and I was 17, had asked when I was telling him about the party what my colors were. And his wife helped direct the florist in choosing the flowers. They arrived just after the first guests, who were staying for the weekend.