TBT: Jason's Birthday and His Cakes

We had angel food cake again this week. Jason's favorite cake, and we have it once a year, every year. Sometimes we buy it already made, sometimes I attempt to make it. I'm a terrible cook and I ruin most everything. Mostly it's because I won't stay in the kitchen long enough to see something through. So I've burned a lot of things—including three stoves/ovens. (See Burning Cookies for the Kids.) ​

One year, I read all about how to do an angel food cake well. You can't have any grease within a two block radius, and you have to invert the special tube pan just so on top of a bottle after baking. Though I thought I followed the directions, I guess the cake was still kinda raw when I turned it upside down, because a whole bunch of cake just ran out of the pan all over the bottle, plopping in a big messy (yet grease-free) puddle on the counter. Another  birthday, we were at a time-share in Pagosa Springs (a small town without a bakery) so I needed to bake the cake. I didn't have a tube pan, but I'd seen angel food loaf cakes somewhere and so knew I didn't HAVE to have tube pans. Well, let's just say that time we had angel food cake chunks scraped out with a spoon. This year, Charles provided the cake, so I didn't even have to worry about it. Clearly, the cake Jason is holding in the picture above is NOT one of my creations. It's actually solid enough to hold the candles—not usually a trait my cakes have.