Lawson's Birthday Cake: The Tunnel of Fudge

It's funny that although I can remember what presents I got for some of my birthdays, I don't remember any of my birthday cakes. I know I had them. I remember having birthday parties and blowing out candles. I just don't remember the cakes. Of course, those were the days when we invited kids to come to our house. We put on those little paper cone hats with the elastic string around our chins. We played pin the tail on the donkey and drop the handkerchief before cutting the cake and opening presents. The whole occasion lasted a couple of hours, and then everybody went home.

Back then nobody went to Chuck-E-Cheese or took their friends to play putt-putt or go bowling. Birthday parties, compared to today's fetes, were especially low key.

Except for my eleventh birthday. For that birthday, my mom took me, my siblings, and ten of my closest friends to the Macon Mall, the home of Farrell's restaurant and ice cream parlor. Just inside the door of Farrell's was a candy store. In the dining room, customers could order burgers or sandwiches, but their specialty was dessert. Their biggest dessert was The Zoo, which was simply a punch bowl filled with scoops of fifty different flavors of ice cream. See that bowl on top of the thing those guys are holding up? That's the punch bowl full of ice cream. When I turned eleven, my mom let me have a zoo party. And although nobody showed up wearing a gorilla mask, my zoo party was much more exciting than the one shown to the left. My party lived up to its name. Thirteen kids descended on that punch bowl like they hadn't eaten for weeks. The waiters and waitresses blew horns and beat on a big bass drum. Other customers stared at our table. And then at some point, Jill Hardin got a little carried away and set off the fire alarm.

Good times.

Now my baby boy is eleven, and while I didn't take him to Farrell's for dinner, we did invite a couple of friends over and his extended family. So in a way, we had our own version of a zoo. Stephen cooked filet mignon, and I cooked baked potatoes, stuffed mushrooms, green beans, and mozzarella caprese. Yum.

But the piece de resistance was his birthday cake: the Tunnel of Fudge. Lawson browsed The Chocolate Cake Doctor cookbook and selected this chocolate delight. According to this cook book, the Tunnel of Fudge was the winner of the Pillsbury Bake Off several decades ago. At the time, the baker made the creamy fudge middle out of a packaged chocolate icing mix, which is no longer available. So the author of the cook book, Anne Byrn, tried her own version, and after several unsuccessful attempts, called Pillsbury for assistance.

"Try pudding," they suggested.

She did. And the Tunnel of Fudge was reborn.

The whole time I was baking Lawson's birthday cake, Bruce Springsteen's song "Tunnel of Love" played in my head. It's become a 36-hour earworm that probably won't go away until the whole cake is gone. While it would be fun to revise the Boss's lyrics to suit the cake I made, it's probably easier to recognize that after all the time and effort I put into Lawson's birthday cake, it's a different kind of Tunnel of Love.

We made our way through half the cake tonight, but tomorrow my boys will have to eat it breakfast, lunch and dinner. I'm trying to count my Weight Watchers points, and it's kind of hard to do that with this fudgy delight calling my name from under the cake dome.

Happy birthday, Lawson!