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 an almost 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.

Cake, on the other hand, inspires no such nonsense. Unlike pie, which makes me smile just to look at it, I’m not sure I’d notice if I never had another bite of cake again. And a bad cake – dry, tasteless, did I mention dry – is one of my least favorite foods.

So after making my son suffer through years of terrible cakes baked by yours truly, I wanted him to have a good cake, a really good cake for his birthday this year. We aren’t big birthday party spenders – we celebrate at home with friends and homemade pizza and a bunch of kids chasing each other around the yard. Ordering a cake would be the only real expense besides pizza toppings. So I was willing to pay for a good cake (within reason), but I don’t like what I’ve tasted from most local bakeries. I decided to stop by Via Fresca in Guilderland and have a chat with Cristina Randazzo. I’d never tasted one of her cakes, but she is one of my favorite bakers in the area, and her cookies are some of the best I’ve found in the region.

My son’s favorite flavor is lemon and while he isn’t fussy about cake – or anything else for that matter – he shares my affection for dense, moist cakes that are full of flavor. One day I will take him to the little towns in Georgia where I spent some time a few years ago, and where I swooned over every piece of cake put in front of me. Maybe it’s not that I don’t get cake, I just don’t get northerner cake – no love, no shiver, no soul. When we get a soul-food bakery in Albany, I will be first in line.

Can you make a lemon pound cake, I asked. I went on a bit about moistness and flavor and small towns in Georgia – yes, probably sounded like a cake lunatic, but she listened patiently and said a few magic words about butter and heavy cream and quality. Lemon glaze over it. I was sold.

The cake was wonderful. Shiver and soul. Moist and moist and moist. Sweet in a deep buttery way and then a zingy glaze that lit up every bite with bright hits of pull-no-punches lemon.

I’ve already called to place a second order.