30th Birthday Cake!

Happy Birthday to me! Today is a big one for me—I’m 30 years old. I’m saying goodbye to my 20s and welcoming my 30s with open arms… and cake. 🙂

For the last two years, I’ve shared my birthday cakes with you, so I guess this really makes it a tradition now. You can see last year’s here.

Today is my actual birthday, so this cake was made a little bit before so I had time to photograph and share it with you all. I sort of love that I have “a thing” I do to celebrate with all of you, my online friends. But of course, I also promptly ate a piece of this cake and shared it with Janae who was helping me photograph that day. So in that way, I kind of get to spread out the celebration, too.

So what is this cake? It’s actually really simple. It’s Joy’s Everybody’s Birthday Cake. I saw this recipe on her site recently, and with my birthday coming up, I thought it looked just perfect. At the moment I’m knee deep in cookbook development, regular stuff for ABM, and a little bit of menu development for our soon-to-be-open bar… so it was sort of a relief to just read someone else’s work and follow it. The end result being a truly delicious cake! If you’re in need of an excellent yellow buttermilk cake with creamy chocolate frosting (a true classic), then I highly recommend you try Joy’s recipe.

And then I decorated it with gourmet, colorful popcorn. I kept seeing bags of this at my grocery store, and I really just wanted an excuse to buy it. So I thought I’d use it to decorate my cake. 🙂

Guys, I’m really excited about my 30s. For real! I feel like the first half of my 20s was filled with self-doubt, worry, a lot of hustling just to make rent, failure, multiple broken heart moments, but a few great friendships. Then the second half of my 20s turned out MUCH better as I finally felt like I found my stride with a career path, I fell in love and got married, I bought my first and then second house, and I got to travel and see some truly amazing places.

If my 30s are going to be anything like the second half of my 20s, then I am ALL IN! I have no doubt this decade will also hold plenty of challenges and difficult moments, and I certainly don’t think I’ll always know how to navigate it all, but I feel cautiously confident and hopeful. And I just keep thinking that if on my 20th birthday someone had showed me a glimpse of what my life was going to be like by the time I turned 30, I think I would have seriously jumped for joy. (I’m really thankful for my life, if you can’t tell!) So I’m hoping something similar is true by the time I reach 40, ten years from now.

Blah, blah, blah birthdays. Sorry to ramble so much. It just feels like a big one this year and I’m really excited about it. 🙂

To all my fellow Aquarians out there—happy birthday to you too! xo. Emma

Credits // Author: Emma Chapman. Photography: Janae Hardy.