By Amy Pence-Brown

        The best part about hearing “Happy Birthday to You” on your special day, besides the voices of your loved ones and making birthday wishes, is sharing a lovely, moist, delicious treat made special just for you. Birthday cakes are a long-standing tradition in America, with roots going way back to ancient Rome, but the fancier cakes we know now with icing, decorations, and multiple layers, were previously reserved for the very wealthy. Today, with our culinary and industrial advances and all the necessary ingredients being easy enough to find, the birthday cake has come a long way. Other countries have long had all sorts of elaborate birthday goodies beyond cakes to celebrate their birthdays, like fruit tarts and sweet buns. Americans have recently adopted a similar trend, thinking outside the cake box when it comes to birthday treats, and lucky for us, the Treasure Valley has numerous bakeries to look to for our celebratory sweet confections.

        Local favorites for children’s birthday parties include several long-standing, large grocery stores, including Albertsons, WinCo, Fred Meyer, and Costco. They offer traditional cakes as well as fun character cakes for your kiddos, whose current love may be Dora the Explorer or Thomas the Tank Engine. Pastry Perfection and the Boise Co-op have great bakeries too, where you can order all kinds of special cakes or select from their bakery case for smaller, lovely pre-made treats. Fancier and more elaborate birthday cakes that taste as good as they look are a little more difficult to come by in the Treasure Valley, but if you want a cake shaped like a football helmet or a rainbow trout, Greg Marsh of Greg Marsh Designer Cakes in Eagle is your guy.

        It seems, though, that cupcakes have ousted large-scale cakes in recent years as a kids’ favorite and a parent’s go-to for classroom birthday parties. All the previously mentioned bakeries offer cupcakes, but the Treasure Valley also boasts a number of gourmet cupcake shops. Lilly Jane’s Cupcakes in Eagle has 9–12 different cupcakes daily, including flavors like Oreo Cookie, Raspberry Lemonade, and Coco for Coconut. Full-size cupcakes are $2.50 each, with their version of mini-cupcakes, called Baby Cakes, at $1.50. D’arcy’s Bakeshop & Catering in Nampa also does custom orders of cupcakes for all sorts of special events and holidays, with flavors like huckleberry lemon and gingerbread between $1.25–$1.75 apiece.

        A new phenomenon in the birthday confectionary world is the brilliantly fun creation of cake pops or cake balls. Made by baking a cake, crumbling it, adding a little icing to help it stick together, and rolling the mixture into balls, cake balls are then decorated in fondant or frosting and eaten by hand or on a stick. Boise’s Cake Ballers has taken this unique treat to a new level, offering all sorts of cake balls, from those made to look like golf balls to those decorated in orange and blue especially for Boise State Broncos parties.

        It’s not just kids who love special cakes for their birthdays, though. Adults also love to indulge in something special on their day. And the Treasure Valley is home to some pretty spectacular bakeries for more grown-up tastes. Kristyn Davis, a Boise mother of two young daughters shares, “La Vie en Rose is my favorite place to go to for grown-up cakes. My hands-down favorite is their Aloha Cake. Normally I’m a chocolate girl, but this cake is wonderful. My girlfriend bought it for my baby shower and I just fell in love.” La Vie en Rose’s glass case runs the length of their little French bistro in Boise’s Idanha Building, and has adults drooling in front like kids in a candy shop. Pamela’s Bakery in Eagle is another adult favorite, with an extravagant menu including tempting little cakes like Fudgy Flourless Chocolate, Coconut Torte, and Sticky Toffee Cake.

        Whatever the size, shape, or kind our birthday cakes come in, the Treasure Valley is lucky to have so many choices when it comes to celebrating our special day. So, by all means, have your cake, and eat it, too!

Amy Pence-Brown firmly believes you don’t have to wait for birthdays to enjoy cake.