In a roundabout way my boy /u/pizzascout requested my best Birthday Cake Story.

Mind you, that was a reddit lifetime ago, but since then the request has sat in my super secret private sub (a "stack" of false start stories that will wind up here if I ever find motivation to finish them).

So Pizza's order looks at me everyday. Today I finally fill it...

I Want My Birthday Cake (You Bitch)

As a kid growing up in the 80s I watched way too many scary movies.

On Friday nights, my dad would take me and my brothers to my Grandma's house. Dad didn't enjoy it, he hated that woman and we didn't like her a whole lot better. But my Uncle lived there too and we did like him. Plus, that gave my mom a night to herself, so I'm pretty sure it was a case of getting two birds stoned at once.

One of the movies we shouldn't have watched was Creepshow. If you haven't seen it, you almost should. It's absolutely campy as all hell, most (maybe all) of the horror is super tame by today's standards, and it's a Stephen King classic (he even acts in it!).

Well we all watched it at my Grandma's when I was 5 years old and it came out on VHS.

Watch this scene (with or without context). It stuck with me, but in my head was about a "Birthday Cake" (and a bitch who made it).

So here is the thing... after watching that movie, next time there was a family birthday party and it came time for the cake, and it was my Uncle's birthday. He gets this shit eating grin on his face, I used to think he was drunk, but now I realize it for what it was, dude was just high as fuck. So his teeth are almost shooting out of his mouth, maybe sparkling, and he suddenly starts slapping the table and chanting, "Where's my Birthday Cake? I want my birthday cake, I want my birthday cake." And he's got that joy, when you think you're so funny you almost can't execute the joke, but he's fighting through it.

So my dad is fucking laughing and smiling and starts slapping the table too, and joins in, "Where's the birthday cake? We want the birthday cake! Where is the birthday cake you bitch."

And it's just panda-moan-ium. I start joining in. My fucking 4 year old brother who can just barely talk joins in. We're all slapping the table and yelling some combination of "birthday cake" and "bitch" and I bet my mom wanted to die. I bet my bitchy grandma wanted to kill us.

So here is the thing... that first time it was somehow "natural", but it happened every time after and became tradition.

But here is the thing... my Grandma actually was a bitch. It wasn't a clever nickname. I'm sure it burned at her every time the chanting happened. I'm sure she dreamed of revenge. She never came out of the kitchen with an ash tray and brained any of us, instead one year when we weren't even going to get to chant, she served her dish cake cold.

For whatever reason, and I can't even imagine now what it was, we were going to have a Birthday party for my dad on the weekend but she wasn't going to be there. So, after the Friday night visit, she sends us home with a special cake she baked for my dad.

So the party day comes he cuts into this thing, and it's a huge cake with white frosting, but the inside is the darkest of dark chocolate with layer after layer of chocolate filling and it looks like chocolate chips and maybe chocolate chunks poking out of it. Like you look at a piece and you can't even be sure what you'd gonna eat, except that it's maybe gonna give you diabetes even just by looking at it.

So my dad takes a bite out of his piece and we hear this fucking horrible cracking noise and he lets out a, "Olga, you bitch!" and we all start chanting, "We want our birthday cake, Olga you bitch, we want our birthday cake..."

But my dad wasn't amused. That bitch had baked him his "childhood favorite" - which I'm quite sure it wasn't - a "Money Cake" - and googling it now says "there is nothing edible" about such a cake. Well, what she would do is take coins and wrap them in wax paper and somehow bake them into his cake when he was a kid so he would walk away from his slice 40cents richer and be able to go buy a pack of smokes.

This time, she, I guess, on a limited budget, just used pennies. And, I guess, didn't have any wax paper on hand so I'm sure she just washed em real good. And, I guess, she didn't want to ruin the "money cake" surprise by giving any of us a heads up on the special ingredient.

My dad broke a tooth on a penny. Olga was a bitch indeed.