Behold, the Picaken.

We finally celebrated Ben’s birthday, and it was a fun day.

We had a hot breakfast together, played some games, read some books, and played outside.

But for me, the crowning moment was the success of my surprise birthday dessert for Ben. While I was in Florida, I read this blog post about the weirdest dessert I had ever heard of – the Picaken.

Basically, you bake a pie, and then you bake it into a cake, and then you enjoy a ridiculously delicious taste of a ridiculous-sounding treat. When I read the description of it, I thought, “That’s gross!….Ben would love it.”

Ben likes to eat really weird things. His favorite sandwich includes meat, cheese, and jam. It feels so wrong to make that for him. But he’s really happy when he eats weird things.

So I had a feeling that a pie (one of his favorite desserts) baked into a cake of weirdness would make him really happy.

Turns out, Picaken is delicious. So strange.

You should totally try it. Here are  some pictures of me literally throwing the pie onto the cake batter:

You could never tell from the outside that there’s a pie in there…

When you cut into it, it’s gooey and moist and wonderful.

I asked Ben what his favorite kind of pie is, and he had a hard time choosing, but he finally went with mixed berry. So I made a mixed berry pie, and threw it into a lemon cake. But really, there are endless flavor combinations you could try.

Ben thinks it might work to just skip the pie part, and put pie filling straight into the center of your cake. Maybe we’ll try that next time. But he says he really likes the uniqueness of actually baking a pie into a cake. He also likes the name of it. He thinks it sounds like a mythical creature, so he began to tell the girls a story about the mythical creature, the Picaken, who roams the forests of Belize…

So that was Ben’s birthday, Picaken and all.

How do you like to celebrate birthdays? Any suggestions for next year? 🙂