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There’s a tradition in my family. One that depending on one’s age, or experience of the past year, each member either dreads or looks forward to. When a birthday rolls around, the family member being celebrated gets to pick a dessert they’d like for their birthday “cake”. However, they get NO say in what the cake looks like.

This is an important distinction, because ever since I can remember, the birthday dessert is sculpted, decorated, or manipulated into representing a significant aspect of whatever the given person has gone through for the last year. Some years it’s been a joke, about someone being obsessed with a new sport (a replica of a frisbee golf “hole” filled with chocolate chip cookie “discs”), or deciding a new career path (when I wanted to grow up to be president, it was a perfectly iced presidential seal), or when someone became politically involved in a local topic (complete with picketing lego people around a factory). These examples don’t even begin to cover the creative territory my mom can handle…but suffice it to say there are a great number of interesting scenarios that have been played out on top of desserts in my family.

So saying, when my brother got back from his latest fire fighting trip, he had a pretty good idea of what his birthday dessert might look like. After picking a favorite blueberry crumb cake, he figured it’d be something about his mad chainsawing skills, which have kept him and his crews safe for years now. But it was his descriptions of the scenery that stuck with the rest of us: fighting fires along the Pacific Coast, on steep coastal slopes that made chainsaw work dangerous, and under constant attack from poison oak. In fact, my poor brother came back from his three week stint covered in disgusting looking wounds and rashes from the poison oak, and tales of the necessary prednisone shots that tend to make a group of gruff, overworked and under-rested firefighters a little aggressive. I suppose we were all glad that these risks weren’t as fatal as the fire itself can be, but we did wish that he was given better protection from the issues he did face.

This cake, however, topped a lot of previous efforts. It recreated the steep slope, with the crumbs standing in for the rough dirt and rocks. Instead of candles, my mom covered it with toothpicks, and carefully topped them with foliage made of crepe paper, making it a realistic depiction of a forest that WAS INDEED HIGHLY FLAMMABLE. She even cut up green gummi bears and scattered them around to look like poison oak. When presented with this bizarre cake, which went up quite like a California wildfire when it was lit, we prodded him to do what he does best; to put the fire out, fast. That he did, though bits of ash were still floating down when the cake was cut. Luckily for us, he put out yet another fire, and even more importantly, his weeks of firefighting gave him the healthy appetite required for the clean up.

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