Weekend

What do you do when your birthday falls on the same day as Easter? You try and find something fun and interesting to do since everyone is pretty much going to church, eating or spending time with their families. In the big scheme of things the date of your birth ranks nowhere near the holiest day of the year.

So you start your birthday weekend off right as you do every year by observing what you consider to be the holiest event of every year. That would be Yul Brynner traipsing around in a little mini skirt for four complete hours. What more could a girl ask for? I bow down to the altar of Cecil B. DeMille every year right before my birthday. Have you watched it? You can skip all of the scenes that do not include Yul Brynner. Really. What is the point? "Does that matter? You will be my wife. You will come to me whenever I call you, and I will enjoy that very much. Whether you enjoy it or not is your own affair. But I think you will.. " Oh, yeah. I will.

The day of my birthday was pretty much doing whatever I pleased and stuffing my face. First, it was waking up and grabbing a bottle of hair dye to try and erase those gray hairs that make you feel even older on your birthday. Then it was off to dim sum. Even though it was Sunday I thought it would not be as busy do to the holiday. Wrong. Arriving early meant easy parking and no line to wait in when we arrived. It was mayhem when we left.

I then decided that I would do my own cupcake crawl on the way home. When I say it out loud it sounds rather gluttonous, but what the hell? The first top was at good old Alliance Bakery. I still love that place.

Don't you love this macaron tree?

The cake design is pretty amazing. All of the baked goods are fantastic and the prices are so reasonable.

I narrowed it down to one of the filled cupcakes. I settled on the Hazelnut cupcake filled with hazelnut praline mousse and frosted with chocolate fudge. As a side note, I was being helped by a nice young woman when this in credibly cute young thing came around to collect some baking pans. Oh, he must have been all of 25 years old...maybe. Anyway, all I could think was "Happy Birthday to me!" I know, "Shut up, you cougar!"

The next top on the crawl was Bleeding Heart Bakery which I had never been to before. Oh, so glad I tried it.

I settled on the Veruca Salt cupcake which is filled with salted caramel and frosted with caramel frosting. I thought it was named for Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka, but it was actually named for the rock band that took her name. I forgot I was at the punk rock pastry shop.

This cupcake was from my final stop on the crawl which was Patisserie P. I was not really anticipating anything spectacular from here, but I thought I would get a run of the mill type cupcake for balance. So, I bought a chocolate cupcake. Can you believe they did not have any container for your to transport it home safely? They smacked a piece of paper on it and threw it in a paper bag. Above is what I had when I got home. It 's all in the presentation, people.

Hazelnut from Alliance

Veruca Salt

Since I was in Chinatown I digressed back a few decades and purchased a Pucca item for myself. I have a secret thing for Pucca which was started by Anna Sui. Damn her.

Oh yeah. Those balloons at the top? When I arrived to Spinning class at 5:30 in the morning I found that the members had gotten there early, asked for the key and decorated my bike and the room for my birthday. Who could wish for anything more thoughtful?