Let us eat cake

Val and I celebrated our 1 year anniversary this week.  Not that we went out and made a giant splash of it or anything, just lunch at the same place we met for delicious sushi (Green Dragon rolls are the best thing ever, for the record) and cake.  I baked the cake, which is unusual for me because I find cakes fussy compared to cookies and they don't keep as well.  Cookie bars baked in a big pan are my usual treat but I decided they weren't quite up to the task this time.

The trouble with making a thing you aren't used to making is that you often make it badly.  I got the cake itself and the basic chocolate icing down just fine but the blue icing for the writing was a disaster.  It was far too runny and the letters kept oozing all over the place, smearing the words and running down the side of the cake.  I spent a good long while scooping up icing, trying to re-ice the areas that had grown sparse, watching that icing wander away, and cursing the universe roundly.

I should have been cursing my own incompetence, or perhaps my rushed "Bah, the icing will be fine!" but cursing the universe is generally easier on the ego.  The result was unspectacular in appearance but thankfully the taste was all that I had hoped.

Anniversaries have the potential to be really weird in poly relationships.  I am sure for a lot of people they end up being flashpoints for jealousy especially when a new relationship ends up having a much bigger celebration than an existing one ever did.  This disparity in celebration fervour happened to me because I have never made any kind of fuss about my anniversaries with Wendy.  Rather I have generally been actively disdainful of the very concept.  Val seemed more interested in our anniversary than Wendy ever did though and for some reason I was too.  Not because this one year relationship is more important than my marriage, but somehow this day just felt like something I wanted to celebrate.  It was an inexplicable and unexpected kind of desire but I could not deny that it was there.

There is also the thing that Wendy is going to appreciate me making her a pizza supper far more than a cake but pizza suppers don't do well when decorated with anniversary messages written in blue icing.  I mean, I assume they don't, because I haven't tried.

Now that I think about it I should really make a pizza with icing on it sometime to test.  How I would make that happen without the icing being a melted puddle is an engineering problem I have no idea how to solve though.

Thing is, in any case where it might seem like a jealous reaction might occur there is one thing to keep in mind:  Relationships are all different and you can't compare them piece by piece.  Some of them include living together, some don't, some have sex, some don't, some have mud wrestling, some don't, some include cakes, some don't.  Picking any one axis to focus on is missing the forest for the trees.  Trying to maintain some kind of constant ratio in all the facets of a two relationships is impossible, not to mention unpleasant, though I suppose it might be good for some humorous moments.  (Okay, so, you and I get 78% of a cake for each cake I have with her, so let's make a cake and toss 22% of it out so everything stays in alignment!)

In any case making the cake was a good learning experience and it is yummy so I am happy.