Benjamin's Birthday Cake. Ahem. Sort of.

Every year for Ben's birthday, he has his mom make Angel Food Cake. It's his favorite cake. This last week, I was asking him what he wanted me to make for his birthday dinner. 

"I don't care what we have for dinner," Ben said. "But I do love Angel Food cake ..." It was not a subtle hint at all. If you have any background knowledge of my cooking skills, you'll know why I was more than a little nervous for that particular request. 

The morning of his birthday, we both had to leave for class around the same time. I got home around eleven in the morning, the house empty. I pulled out my mom's recipe for the first time and felt my stomach sink. 

I didn't have cake flour. 

Or cream of tartar. 

Or a tube pan. 

I thought maybe I could do it without those, but I wanted to wait and ask my mom. I decorated our kitchen with streamers and blew up 174 balloons (hours of entertainment for Benjamin) until my mom was home from work. I called her and told her my dilemma. 

"So, can I make it without those?" I asked. 

"Well, I'm afraid not," she said. "Definitely not without the right pan, or cream of tartar. You might be able to get away with using something other than cake flour, but it just won't work as well." 

"Okay," I said, my heart sinking. What was I going to do? I really wanted to make the cake, since it was Benjamin's favorite. Plus, I'd already bought candles for it. "I'll see what I can do." 

After my mom wished me luck, I hung up and decided to head to Wal Mart--despite my time limitations and the floods of rain that were coming down outside. 

I went to the pan section first. I found a round pan, with a bottom that came out. I wasn't sure if it was the right one, but I couldn't see any others that might work. Unfortunately, I had left my phone at home so I couldn't call my mom to make sure i was right. If you know anything about Angel Food cakes, you know how this is going to end. 

I finished my shopping and hurried home. I started mixing the cake, following the recipe exactly. I was very worried I was going to mess something up and was being very careful not to do so. There was one part of the recipe I wasn't quite sure of, so I called my mom. While I already had her on the phone, I told her the kind of pan I had gotten. 

"That'll work, right?" I said. I expected her to assure me it would. 

She told me it wouldn't. I guess because the cake batter is made up primarily of egg whites and sugar, the cake can't support itself in the middle while it's baking. That's why angel food cake pans have a smooth tube in the center and the batter cooks itself around it. 

Well, I was determined to make this cake, especially since I'd already started to. Realizing that Wal Mart hadn't had what I needed, I decided to go door to door on our street trying to find a pan I could borrow. We have plenty of older ladies in the ward and I figured somebody had to have them. I went to four different houses with no luck; the fourth house, though, the lady introduced herself as Shelby. She told me that she did not have one, but she knew her mother, the bishop's wife, had one. 

It was a miracle. Except that her mother wasn't home; she was at parent-teacher-conferences, as a teacher. Shelby took me over there and looked everywhere she could think. Her 8-year-old son was with us and was convinced that "Papa" would know where to look. He ran and got the Bishop, who had no idea what a tube pan even was. 

To make a long story short, I went home without a pan, my time before Benjamin got home dwindling. Still wondering what in the world I was going to do, I looked up online if there were ways to make an angel food cake in a different pan. And I found one! 

Following the instructions, I emptied a can of peaches and washed it out. Then I took some shortening and spread it on the bottom of the can to seal it to the middle of my pan. It made an interesting makeshift pan. I then poured the batter into the pan and put it in the oven with a sigh of relief. I thought my cake nightmare was over. 

THEN, about five minutes after putting it in the oven, I smell burning. I open the oven and the cake batter is DRIPPING OUT OF THE BOTTOM OF MY BRAND NEW PAN. I wanted to cry. I pulled the pan out and tried to scrape the burnt cake off the bottom of my oven. It was too late, of course, to stop the burnt smell from filling my entire house. 

I didn't really know how to fix the pan, so I set it on a cookie sheet and put the cake back into the oven to finish cooking. When it was done, I took it out and flipped the whole pan upside down (exactly how you are supposed to). As soon as it was upside down, the entire bottom of the pan decided to come apart from the rest of the pan and flop onto the counter, cake first. 

At this point, I was so done with the cake. I didn't even try to get the bottom (which, by the way, was covered in melted shortening from my "sealed can") of the cake off the pan. I set the entire pan bottom on a plate and stuck the candles in that. 

Ben got home and the first words out of my mouth were, "You do not know what I went through to make you this cake today."

It was worth it. We ate the entire top of the cake off. And it was delicious.