Lemon pound cake from Via Fresca, Guilderland, NY

There are two things you don’t want me to do for you: sing and bake. Which means that come birthday season things get a bit tricky around my house. This year my son is turning 10, and while he will still walk down the street with me, it has dawned on him that perhaps I am not queen of the entire universe. We were discussing his birthday party, and with as much tact as a 10-year-old can muster he ventured, “Mom, maybe we could leave the cake to the professionals.”

What, my tasteless bricks aren’t good enough for you? OK, OK, we can talk about the cake.

The singing is another matter. In my family you know it is your birthday because your phone rings and some kind of Bob-Dylan-with-a-bad-cold impersonator gets on the line and blasts you with a passionate rendition of Happy Birthday. There is no escaping it. My brother is 35 and croons as badly as I do – maybe even worse – but my birthday would not be the same without him and his speakerphone busting call. Welcome to the family, my son. You are doomed to dreadful serenading for the rest of your life, but you are not doomed to crap cake.

On this point, I accept defeat. I decided to leave the cake to the pros … but which pros? As bad a baker as I am, I am picky to the point of ridiculousness about cake. I’m not sure why this is. Fussiness isn’t generally my thing, but cake, cake makes me a little weird. Maybe it’s because, with few exceptions, I don’t see the point.

The more I love a food the less fussy I am – the same could probably be said for my feelings about men and cities and old sweatshirts – if I love you it’s OK if you stink, and are a little rough around the edges and need a few repairs. I would like you to be great, but I’ll take you as you are. Love does that – clouds the judgment, makes the mind all gooey, tints the sky rose.

Pie, for example, I love, and therefore can’t think straight about. Great pie is on my short list of life’s pleasures, but I am perfectly happy to sit at a diner, sip trucker coffee and make my way through a slice of goo. In fact, I recently had a piece of cherry pie at a diner in Newburgh that had so much corn starch in it that it was like eating a huge half-melted cherry-flavored gummy bear. I had to pry my tongue from the roof of my mouth between bites. Not my favorite, not by a long stretch, but it was pie. And a day with pie, even really, really bad pie is almost always better than one with no pie.

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Pesto in your 40s

I made a lot of bad pesto in my 20s. Really bad. Light-your-gut-on-fire-and-lose-all-your-friends bad. And what’s worse, I persisted in such mad culinary folly for years. That was how I rolled in my 20s, slow to learn and even slower to recognize a bad idea. When I thought I had something right, I just pushed, bullheaded and unrelenting, thinking that the universe would come to see things my way if I just shoved hard enough. I called it passion. The many people I offended called it arrogance. It was passionate arrogance, I suppose – not a good combination in life or pesto.

The problem was the garlic, which, if you think about it, is really just passion in its edible state. Garlic inspires love and hate, swooning and disgust. It gives only an obligatory nod to the superficial tongue before invading the back of the nose, the blood and the belly. Garlic courses through you, warming or igniting, always heat, sometimes fire. In the wrong hands – like those of arrogant 20-something with a new food processor – raw garlic can come to no good end. It’s too much too soon. How can you know what to do with this kind of passion at such a clumsy age? When I was 25, I thought passion meant intensity, and intensity meant truth, and truth was the ultimate goal -- the more of it the better. This made me a better journalist than it did a cook.

I once made a batch of pesto with an entire bulb of garlic. Passionate arrogance run amok. It was typical, I suppose, of my belief that if a little was good, quadrupling would surely be better. Oh how wrong I was. It’s a short list of life’s pleasures that are better when taken to excess – daffodils, perhaps, and maybe cherries, but not garlic. Certainly not garlic.

It took me years to realize that one batch of pesto, even a really, really big one, does not require 10 cloves of garlic. Nor does it require eight, or even six cloves. Even now I can hear the voice of my youth cajoling – surely you could squeeze six in there? No, Celina, no you cannot. I find this hard to accept for some reason. It offends my sense of how the world should work. More doesn’t always equal better? Say it ain’t so. I had to wean myself of my allegiance to unbridled exuberance, backing down one clove at time. I was stubborn in my 20s. Or maybe it was all the raw garlic addling my brain. I made it down to about four cloves, which gives you just plain-old offensive pesto, as opposed to mad scientist toxic crap.

And then, I just stopped.

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Cute versus brave: Strawberry-basil and raspberry-mint lemonade

Last summer, my kids waded into American capitalism with their first lemonade stand. There’s one weekend a year when we get heavy foot traffic in front of our house as people walk to a big event down the block. The kids mixed several gallons of Country Time, popped up the card table, and prayed for sun.

The marketing strategy was simple: stick the six-year-old twin girls out front as sales reps and charge 30 cents a glass, a look-cute price that enticed most customers to drop a dollar on the table and refuse their change.

The sun shone, the crowds flocked, and my kids made 30 bucks in less than two hours. They could have made more, but we ran out of lemonade. This was heady stuff for their first entrepreneurial venture. They’ve been debating plans for this year’s beverage gambit ever since.

My daughters are happy to go with the proven strategy of hawking cheap product with cute girls. My son – lacking pigtails and a swishy skirt, and, perhaps, possessing a tad more integrity -- has other ideas.

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