The cake that wasn't

Aeryn has a super-cute friend who has super-fun ideas. On Mother's Day, the girls came up to me and proclaimed that they wanted to make an Angel Food cake for E's mother. It's her favorite treat and like a darling daughter E was determined to do something special for her mom. I didn't have the ingredients on hand and the timing wasn't the best so we endeavored to try it this past week.

It didn't turn out quite as planned. Try as they might they just couldn't keep the egg yolks out of the whites, which spells D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R when egg white-whipping is to occur. They were so very focused though, and were both really quite excited to be trying. They would switch off every egg or two, doing really well until once or twice the yolk would break in the separator or would fall into the measuring cup intact. They tried to dig out all the yolks creating a sort of swirly, eggy mess.

{Forgive the blur. Uncontrollable laughing of the subjects will do that to a photo.}

We decided to see if it would turn out and added the rest of the ingredients just in case it would be ok. It wasn't.

As I watched it all unfold all I could think of was Junior High School, when Mara and I loved to bake and would often dream up some treat or another. One afternoon after riding my bike to her house I was especially proud of my newly developed skill of cracking an egg into a bowl one-handed. Eager to show Mara but still wound up from riding up the insane hill to her house, I smashed the egg down on the bowl a little way too hard. It dripped half into the bowl, half onto the table, and started dripping through the table seam for the leaf onto the floor below. It was at that point her mother said "I can't watch this." and left us to our own devices. We baked a lot. We made messes a lot. We always cleaned up after ourselves so that we'd still be allowed to bake again.

In the end, I think it's part of what makes me like to bake to this day.

I guess what I get out of this is that a failed Angel Food cake is a small price to pay for kids having fun in the kitchen.