Another Sleep Invention: The Cannoli Saw

So, our lives are about to change. A baby will come and live with us. Whee! Scary, though, right?

Henry’s birthday will happen right after the baby is born, and I can’t help but wonder: how are we to go about celebrating normal / special life events through these life-changing events?

Last year, when he turned two, we had a pretty big party. It was held in a space down the street that we rented. Wait, was that in a wholly different economy? Wait, was I a part of the 1% then? Also, I made about a jillion different sorts of cupcakes with many sorts of creatively conceived and executed toppings. Fluff frosting with black Himalayan salt, lemon buttercream, chocolate ganache. I made a truck out of a poundcake. God, I hope he doesn’t remember how good life was when he was turning two, and we were rich, and birthdays were littered with poundcake trucks everywhere.

This year, we must keep it simple. These are the ways in which I hope to do this:

1. It will be at home, so we don’t have to go anywhere, and almost no one will be invited. Should you not be invited, please reference the blog post on this topic in order to mitigate your feelings of rejection. Should you be invited, please try to limit the communicable diseases you bring over, since I’ll have a 2 week old.

2. Lower your expectations regarding myriad, well-planned snacks. This time around, I will serve only round foods that someone else has prepared, with the possible exception of cupcakes, which would be cooked by me, but still will still be (hopefully) round.

The other foods will be bagels and their accoutrements (like SMOKED FISH, which I intend to eat by the fistful the moment I give birth), served in the round containers we will buy them in, as well as donuts from Peter Pan donut in Williamsburg, but I don’t even know if we’ll manage to get out there in order to buy some of the fabulously round, made-by-other people donuts. These are the donuts that you read about on the Internet. These are the donuts that you dream about. These are the porn donuts. These are the donuts that the other moms with two children manage to have at their kids birthday parties, where they also only serve bagels and cupcakes — perhaps a smidge of fruit. I do hope to be able to pull that one off.

When I’m nervous about something, I like to have a plan brewing in my brain. Sometimes I brew plans while dreaming. Last night I dreamt about the birthday party, and this is the menu I’d selected:

• lentil soup
• salad
• cannolis

The cannolis were cannoli shells covered with dark glossy chocolate, filled with ricotta cream, and decorated with berries. Wow, were these cannolis were a thing of beauty. I was delighted to be able to serve them at the uber casual birthday party. But there was a problem, in that the cannolis were too long for one person to comfortably eat. And you know how you can’t really cut a cannoli because that bumpy shell stuff will just crumble? I mean, even biting one is a problem, in my experience.

I sound like I think a lot about cannolis: I don’t, actually, when I am awake. But this leads us to my brilliant invention. In my sleep, I dreamt up a small, specialized serrated knife called a cannoli saw. It allowed you to slice the shell (chocolate-covered or not) cleanly so that one cannoli (cannolo?) could be subdivided between multiple party guests. And you could put the bumpy shell in your mouth one bite at a time, and any shattering would be private, and not down the front of your shirt.

Zoaster, move over. Another award-winning dream invention.