Angel Food Cake

For years now, I have been on a mission to bake an angel food cake just like my grandma used to make. This may seem like a relatively easy task. After all, Betty Crocker sells angel food cake mixes in a box. The thing is, after eating my grandma's angel food cake for so many years, I can remember the taste and texture so vividly that I won't go near the stuff in a box--it's not even close. Grandma's angel food cake was, literally, food for the angels. Moist and soft on the inside and crispy on the outside, topped with fluffy French cream frosting. Ahhh. Perfection.

I know for a fact that Grandma spent many years mastering the art of the angel food cake, and even after she'd baked it for half her life, she still had flops once in a while. She told me that she once had to bake three different cakes for a friend's birthday before one of them finally came out just right. The humidity in the air that day had caused the first two cakes to collapse!

What makes my mission so difficult is not just that I have never made an angel food cake from scratch before--I also do not have my grandma's recipe. I honestly don't even know if she had the recipe written down anywhere. I remember her saying something about the cake having eight egg whites, but that's all I know. This means having to try a variety of recipes before I find one that tastes like my grandma's.

Really, though, it's not about duplicating the little piece of heaven I used to enjoy on every birthday so much as it is about remembering and paying tribute to my grandma. Baking for her was an art. Every Christmas, she filled ice cream pails full of gingerbread men and other cookies. On Thanksgiving, her "impossible" pumpkin pie was my favorite part of the meal. I looked forward to when Grandpa harvested his zucchini crop every summer so Grandma could make her zucchini chocolate cake. She collected recipes from magazines and newspapers and tweaked those recipes until they were just right and until they were uniquely hers.

Even after Grandma started showing signs of dementia, she still figured out a way to bake. When she was unable to remember which ingredients she had added to whatever she was baking, she started putting the ingredients she was going to add on one side of the counter and moving them to the other side of the counter after she had added them. Baking was her therapy, and when she could no longer bake because she could no longer remember what day it was or how to turn on the oven, in many ways her life stopped.

I wish I would have learned more from my grandma when I had the chance. But isn't that so often the case? If she were still alive today, I'd ask her the secret to her angel food cake. I'd stand beside her in the kitchen and commit to memory the way she cracked eggs and stirred the ingredients.

My husband never had a chance to meet my grandma. Neither did my nephews or niece. To them she's only a photograph. I hope that once I learn to make an angel food cake like my grandma's, I can share in a tangible way a little of my grandma with those who never knew her. But I suppose the perfect angel food cake isn't really necessary. Afterall, I am her granddaughter; she is a part of who I am. I love that.