Sami turned four today, and for the first time in his life he got an actual, baked, made-by-me birthday cake. This is a bigger event than it sounds.

A little birthday history. For his first birthday, Sami's cake was an apple. A literal apple - he was so obsessed with them that year that you couldn't bite into one anywhere in the house without him materializing for his share. Birthdays two and three we spent traveling, so the "cake" was a can of wet dog food, which he considered the height of luxury because he never normally gets it.

But this year we were home, and I decided he deserved the real thing. I am not a baker. I have never baked. So I asked the Westie parents in our community, and they came through with a flood of dog cake recipes, and I picked one and committed.

Somewhere between the mixing and the decorating I got completely obsessed with getting it right - it's a cake for a dog who cannot read, and I was fussing over it like a wedding order. There were games, there were presents, and there was a four-year-old Westie who could not believe his luck.

The verdict from the birthday boy: demolished. Whatever doubts I had about my baking career, the client was satisfied, the bowl-adjacent floor was inspected twice, and a precedent was officially set - there's no going back to the apple after this.

He's four. I still see him as a puppy. I've accepted that when he's fourteen I'll still see him as a puppy, and I've decided that's fine.

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