Angel Food Cake

Last night, I dreamt of T., persistently. Probably because of Ma ( my mother in law), who fell from her bed in the nursing home where she now lives. But the dreams were not good, in the sense that they were snippets of recreated events that one’s brain stores to further skew an already complicated relationship. 

When I was young, my Inay (mother) baked to-die-for angel food cake. 

My Inay was a hard act to follow. When T and I acknowledged our relationship to my family, he began spending dinners with us daily, and I wondered if he was in it for me, or for my Inay’s cooking. He also repeatedly said: when I first saw your Inay, I thought she looked like she could have been an “artista” ( an umbrella term for artist, but in this context he meant movie star). 

We were already living in New York when I learned how to cook and bake. I would call my Inay using a phone card while cooking, and she would walk me through whatever it was I was cooking. Later, I got the feeling for cooking. As my Inay used to say, recipes are mostly there to guide you - but you have to be able to feel and embrace the love for cooking. 

Baking angel food cake was something I’d always wanted to do and never got around to doing, because: I was intimidated by the prospect of the batter falling, and me, failing.  The recipes talked about using a tube pan, which I didn’t own and refused to buy. There was also a time in my life when I was provoked by certain questions sometimes not entirely related to the action I needed to take: like, why call a white cake angel food cake and a dark cake devil’s food cake? 

I googled the recipe again and found a few that gave workarounds to not having a tube pan. One called for putting an aluminum can in the center of the pan to simulate the tube part,  another said use a loaf pan instead and fill it two thirds of the way so the batter doesn’t overflow. Finally, I found a website that gave a few tips on working with regular glass pans, which I have. 

Here. I cut the cake up into pieces. It rose too high, I lopped off the top and ate it. It didn’t look perfect, but I think it’s charming and the flowers helped show an unrepressed gaiety.

I’m getting there. But like the baking of the angel food cake, I shouldn’t hurry with acquiring patience for myself.

My Inay on the day of my wedding.

Ma, my mother in law. I brought her a piece of the angel food cake yesterday. She will be 103 years old next month.