Today is my birthday. I am overcome with joy.

Another year older, another year wiser, another year closer to Polident.

All kidding aside, life isn’t too shabby. I have my health, a great husband, a fine home, great family and friends, two smiley dogs, 32 chickens, an orchard, a garden, a canning pantry, two books in development, more home brew  than I can drink and — this one is a stretch — my dewy good looks.

To mark this day of joy, Jake is baking me a carrot cake with my name on it. I’ve always said, a birthday is not a birthday without seeing my name in icing. For my birthday dinner, I have requested a large slab of beef, cooked rare. Steak and cake: Is there anything more appropriate to eat on one’s day of reckoning?

The carrot cake recipe comes from Cook’s Illustrated, and I couldn’t help but notice it’s two and a half pages long, single spaced. I’ve written about the haughty, condescending tone of this culinary tome before — a voice no doubt influenced by the magazine’s editorial director and founder, the bow-tie wearing, super WASP Christopher Kimball — but allow me to share a few snippets of the opening paragraphs. (For full effect, it should be read in a voice like Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island):

“A relic of the health food craze, carrot cake was once heralded for its use of vegetable oil in place of butter and carrots as a natural sweetener. But healthy or not (and we doubt it ever was), we have eaten far more bad carrot cake than good  [sniff, and adjust your imaginary monocle here]. The carrots make the cake invariably soggy. And the oil? It’s a veritable Exxon Valdez for the mouth. Save for the mercilessly thick coating of cream cheese frosting, most carrot cakes are nothing more than good spice cakes gone bad.”  Snap!

It continues:

“Our initial research turned up numerous recipes, and we chose several that seemed promising, but they were, with the exception of only one, very bad. They were so ghastly, in fact, that we had no choice but to dump them in the barrel located outside the test kitchen, douse them in gasoline and light them on fire before Mr. Kimball urinated all over them. But the test wasn’t a complete “wash,” however, as we were able to make some delightful roasted chestnuts over the still smoldering embers….”

Okay, perhaps I took some artistic license with the write-up, but that’s the general gist of it.

I am so going to enjoy my birthday meal!