My Childhood Birthday Cake

Year after year, as a kid, I would get the same cake. My favorite cake was from Sanborn’s, a pharmacy/restaurant/bakery/magazine store in Mexico City, where I grew up.
I was not particularly interested in the actual cake part of the cake. Nothing wrong with it, it was vanilla sponge cake with cream and fresh strawberries between the layers.
What made my cake memorable was the outside: the cake was covered with a really thick, fluffy layer of Italian meringue with stiff white peaks streaked with food coloring and colorful nonpareils. The best part was that on top of the cake, stuck in the frosting were ice cream cones with even more meringue piped thick to make it look look like, well, ice-cream cones with ice-cream.
My mother had to make sure there were enough cones for each of my friends, me and my little sister.
After breaking a piñata, pulling out costumes from the costume trunk, doing sing-alongs, watching the magician, or whatever fun thing we did that year, the cake showed up to great fanfare. Year after year, my friends would sing Happy Birthday and the traditional Mexican birthday song “Las Mañanitas” and then go straight for the cones. As we grew up, there might have been a little meringue fight and at last, we would get a bit of the actual cake, now looking a bit disheveled, with a glass of milk.
Year after year, that cake became a thing for me and my friends…and many years after, right before selling my childhood home, I ordered the same
ice-cream cone cake to celebrate my baby daughter’s 6-months with the same friends. 🍦🎂