Happy Birthday, Holy Mother Church!

Happy Pentecost, Everyone!

I hope you are having a wonderful time celebrating the birthday of our wonderful Catholic Church!

I think I may have mentioned or linked to a tradition of having a birthday cake for this feast day already, but thought I'd share a recipe I received from a friend in an e-mail in case you'd like to try it.

I am quoting almost the entire e-mail so you can get a sense of the history of this practice for my friend and her friend. I hope you enjoy it.



PENTECOST CAKE, very easy and quick, do with the kids or for your friends...Or bring it to a family for Sunday dessert...

I usually send this reminder ahead of time but I'm in the US this weekend for my son' s soccer game so I've had no time to look up my usually yearly email about this. I send it every year. Since I cannot find it now I took the info below from the web...

Some friends and I started a bit if tradition as this is a very important feast and little is done for it because there is no money to be made like at Christmas and Easter...but we decided to get our families aware of its importance by praying to the Holy Spirit as a family after mass before the Blessed Sacrament. One year we decorated candles with Christian symbols and printed the cake idea and info about the prayers to the Holy Spirit rolled it up and gave it to our neighbors with a decorated candle so they could join in the new family tradition.

Another year a catechism teacher got the Confirmandi to bake the cakes at the church, one was fully decorated and placed on a table for showing....the rest were given out to the parishioners after each mass with coffee...The cake could be done gluten free with a potato flour cake recipe. You can use cool whip or any icing you like. The red ribbons could have the 7 gifts written on them with gold marker or paint...you can reuse them each year...


Pentecost Sunday, also known as Whitsunday, ranks among the great feasts of Christianity. "It commemorates not only the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and Disciples, but also the fruits and effects of that event: the completion of the work of redemption, the fullness of grace for the Church and its children, and the gift of faith for all nations."

To Celebrate, we will be baking and decorating a cake! I just love all the symbolism in this cake. It provides such a wonderfully yummy way to teach the children more about this feast.


Pentecost Cake

Directions:

Start with a white cake representing "Whitsunday." The cake can be home-made or store-bought, which ever you choose. To keep it simple, I usually just use a white cake mix.

Now for the decorations:
White Frosting - For "Whitsunday"
Large Candle in Center - represents Christ our Light, who promised to send the Holy Ghost.
12 Birthday Candles - represent the 12 Apostles and the tongues of fire.
7 red hearts - made of candy or icing, represent the 7 gifts of the Holy Ghost
12 strawberries - represent the 12 fruits of the Holy Ghost
Before cutting the cake, let the children blow out the candles representing the "mighty wind."

Serve with vanilla ice cream and even more strawberries!!

Enjoy!!

God bless and have a wonderful Pentecost Sunday!