It’s not every day your daughter turns 20.

But it is nearly every day that annoying commitments stop you from doing important things - like buying the birthday cake and candles - especially when my wife is traveling.

So, late at night, after useless meetings and well after when shops close, I asked Claude (the most creative of the lot):

I have bread, Nutella, peanut butter, jam, and the usual household supplies. How can I celebrate my daughter’s 20th birthday with a birthday cake using stuff like these? Any creative ideas?

It was excited. (It’s always excited. Sycophancy’s bad, but … that’s like puppies … and then you can’t say anything.)

What a fun challenge! Here are some creative ideas using what you have:

It began listing ideas. I was hooked at the very first one.

🎂 “Sandwich Cake” (Smörgåstårta-style, but sweet) Stack several slices of bread into layers, using Nutella, peanut butter, and jam as fillings between each layer. Then “frost” the outside with Nutella (it spreads beautifully like chocolate frosting). Decorate the top with swirls of peanut butter and jam. Slice it like a real cake — it’s surprisingly impressive and delicious.

What a brilliant idea! So, I did exactly that.

  1. Toast 4 slices of bread. Level 2. Bendable, warm, with barely a tinge of crispiness and golden yellow.
  2. Spread strawberry jam and peanut butter. Classic PB&J. But I know a trick from decades of experience: less jam tastes better. So, a very thin layer. Also, the heat made peanut butter more spreadable.
  3. Stack the layers. I made a 4-layer cake, alternating between PB&J.
  4. Frost the outside with Nutella. I warmed it up in the microwave for 20 seconds (I swear - GitHub Copilot auto-completed this part with the exact timing it took me!) and spread it smoothly. I covered the entire cake with a thin layer of Nutella, mostly with a spoon, and a little with my fingers to get into the nooks and crannies. (Then I licked the spoon and fingers, of course.)

The nicest part is that it looks like a real cake. The ridges of spread Nutella did look like frosting.

Any clever way I could write HBD on the sandwich cake using household ingredients like sugar or peanut butter? I mean, how do I get the lettering right without a syringe or something?

Turns out there’s a smart way:

🥄 The Ziplock/Plastic Bag Trick (Best Option). Spoon Nutella or peanut butter into a zip-lock bag (or any plastic bag). Seal it, push the contents to one corner. Snip a tiny corner off — the smaller the snip, the finer the line. Squeeze gently and write slowly.

But unfortunately, I couldn’t find the zip-lock bag. I heated the peanut butter and tried writing with a spoon but messed it up. So, I mixed the peanut butter with the top layer of Nutella, giving it a nutty texture, like nuts sprinkled on the cake.

Next, I have lots of tealight candles. Any clever ideas with that?

… and its second suggestion was:

🌟 Candle Halo Centerpiece Place your birthday cake (or toast stack!) in the center of the table and surround it with a ring of tealights radiating outward. Magical, romantic, and festive all at once.

Brilliant.

I use AI a lot. That’s trained me to think of AI first. Something I’m glad for, because this was my best use of AI ever.

Happy birthday, Dhyeya!