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1950's, Angel Food cake, Baking and Confections, best thing since sliced bread, Daily Post, DPchallenge, memoir, postaday, scratch cake, Sliced bread, Swan's Down flour
Today’s WordPress Daily Prompt, Sliced Bread, spoke to me ~
Most of us have heard the saying, “That’s the best thing since sliced bread!” What do you think is actually the best thing since sliced bread?
..
Hands down, it’s sliced cake.
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……………..
The Swan’s Down Angel Food Cake is a hit with the “girls” who come to gossip and gamble around Mom’s card table. There’s plenty of mayhem and squabbling about who deals, jumps a bid, or passes with help. But they all agree about The Cake. It’s Mom’s chef d’oeuvre ~ the surface cracked and crusted to perfection, tinted Barbie-pink, its insides soft and sweet. No box mix can make a cake like this. You’re just paying for the convenience, Mom says, as if the Devil himself put temptation in the path of this 1950’s housewife. And yet, there was a price to be paid for this exactingly-made-from-scratch cake.
The whites go into the batter, but the yolks do not. On each of the next ten days, Mom plops one into a milkshaky concoction. The yolk doesn’t blend well and so I cringe at what looks like slimy strands of jellyfish in a chalky sea. She serves it in artsy opaque tumblers and makes encouraging noises about health. Both of us know it looks unappealing and tastes worse, but there it is.
On the eleventh day, the madness ends. That afternoon, before the highrollers break out the cards and coins, Mom and I share a piece of Swan’s Down Angel Food.
Just a simple and totally earnest cake ~ and way better than sliced bread.
Toni 1/27/13
For a cake to stop the squabbling at a card table and be liked by all, it must be one very tasty confection. How great that you have the original recipe.
Your Mom used egg yolks in a drink and mine used them to make pasta. It would be interesting to learn what other Moms did with their yolks.
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I have vague memories of a summer drink Mama made with milk, yolks, and pineapple juice…. something having to do with temperature kept it from curdling. I need to ask my older brother or sister for more info on this. I just remember that we kids loved it. My father raised chickens, so we always had fresh eggs.
Ronnie, I wish, wish, wish we knew about the pineapple juice back then. I am lucky to have survived those “drinks”. And that’s no yolk.
Toni
The egg yolk scene makes me grimace in great sympathy. Dreadful. I can remember my mother watching while I drank what seemed to me to be a huge glass of milk. Very cold. Very stomach churning. At least that was A Usual food, unlike amoeba-like yolks. So, do I understand that you didn’t get the piece of cake until all the yolks were gone?
Patty
I love slicing my own bread, so that may be the best thing since: homemade bread every day.
Patty