How do you eat birthday cake?

My students never asked me this question and I never thought about teaching it, but oddly enough, Thais have no idea how to eat a birthday cake.

Twin students of mine, Ing and Iw, threw their own 17th birthday party at a local Korean barbeque restaurant on one of my last days in Buakhao. Lara and I were guests of honor and we brought cake and candles to show the students what western b-days are like.

Thais don’t normally celebrate birthdays at all. They rarely give gifts to the birthday boy or girl, almost never eat cake and most don't have even a small party. But Ing and Iw are hip to falang culture and they took advantage or the opportunity to have some fun. They invited their closest friends who happen to be my best students.

After dinner we brought out the cake and candles and explained the tradition of having a candle per year, singing “Happy Birthday”, then making a wish and blowing out the candles. The 17 candles took up all the room on the cake and the girls lit the outside candles first making it nearly impossible to light the inner candles without burning their fingers. This was only the first of their newbie birthday mistakes.

Then we sang “Happy Birthday” without the refrain “happy birthday, dear _____” which Thais replace with saying happy birthday twice, just for simplicity. Ing and Iw were excited when they blew out all of the candles and thus granting their wish. But then they quickly blurted out their wishes to their friends (to get good grades) and blew it. I had forgot to tell them about the superstition attached to the wish-making, that if you tell anyone your wish, it won’t come true. They were dissapointed, but as all Thais do when they're dissapointed, they laughed.

With a knife from the kitchen, the girls began to cut their cake together, each with a hand on the handle of the knife. Lara and I looked at eachother. Then the kids started singing, “Dah, dah, da-dah” – the wedding song. Lara and I looked at each other again, both realizing that yes, they had mixed up the traditions. Then Ing and Iw fed each other pieces of the cake, each threatening to shove the cake in the other’s face. Lara and I laughed.

Wedding cake rituals aside, they cut out two pieces of cake, handed them to Lara and I on plates, and then passed out spoons to everyone else. Like the begining of a race, the entire group of girls quickly swiped at the cake (minus two slices) in a mad spoon free for all. First went all of the icing, leaving just a strange, deformed mound of cake but in less than half a minute only small crumbs were left.