On birthday cake and ramen noodles.

In exactly two weeks, I will be 48. Which means it’s time for birthday cake.

Enter my coworker, Safiya, who introduced me to the Momofuku Milk Bar last year when we were in New York City for the Visualized conference. They are famous for their birthday cake, among other things, so this weekend, I took my place in the kitchen and made one. It took me two days to do it.

Chef On the Edge: David Chang’s Search for the Perfect Restaurant

Cake is a term with a long history (the word is of Viking origin, from the Old Norse kaka) and denotes a baked flour confection sweetened with sugar or honey; it is mixed with eggs and often, but not invariably, with milk and fat; and it has a porous texture from the mixture rising during cooking. – This History of Cakes

“Momofuku” could be translated from Japanese as “lucky peach”, though Chef David Chang has written that the name is “an indirect nod” to Momofuku Ando,^[7] the Taiwanese-Japanese inventor of instant ramen. Chang also suggested it is not an accident he chose a word that sounds like the English curse word “motherfucker”.^{[8] – Wikipedia}