Yesterday Trixie turned 9.

Sniff.

Time, please slow down.

Since she has severe celiac disease, our usual birthday routine is to make a (meager) boxed gluten-free cake.

This usually involves over-baking, spills, fingerprints in the frosting and aching teeth from the glaring sweetness of it all.

In other words, it’s often not worth the calories. I’ll save mine for Chardonnay.

But this year I had an ace up my sleeve: one of the embryologists at my work is not only an excellent scientist, she’s also a genius cake creator.

And everything she makes is gluten free.

Trixie didn’t know I was ordering a custom cake, so I had to vaguely ask her about various preferences.

Things she likes: rainbows, glitter, dolls.

All came together in this beauty.

I picked out the Barbie that I thought would tolerate the most frosting, but that was the extent of my effort (minus driving the cake home in a snowstorm, avoiding every icy patch and hoping that my plan to use the front seatbelt to keep the cake safe would work. It did).

The inside was a spectacular surprise:

It was also absolutely delicious.

Spouse and I both agreed this was worth stretching our diets a bit. The kids each had two pieces at the birthday dinner and another one for breakfast the next morning.

Family motto: Eat cake for breakfast.

Birthday score!