high-bar baking

The on-the-nose metaphor that I won’t stop myself from making is: A collapse isn’t all that bad when you’re expecting it. 

This is a cake leavened with egg whites. You know the kitchen fables about a gust of wind collapsing a soufflé? That’s the same concept we’re working with here. Eggs whites are capable of trapping thousands of itty-bitty bubbles of air, which in the oven expand to make the cake rise. But they’re unstable. You eat a soufflé immediately out of the oven because of this; it’s also why you cool an Angel Food Cake upside down. (If you did not know, you cool Angel Food Cakes upside down, and that’s why tube pans have feet on the top). You’re trying to work around egg white air pockets collapsing, either by not giving them time to collapse or by playing with the geometry. 

This cake does neither of those tricks, so I know it’s going to collapse. It’s the other reason (aside from taste, I’m sure) that Zoë has you top it with whipped cream and fresh fruit. The rim will stay tall/taller, and the center will sink the most, presenting you with a little cake-bowl for your toppings. 

So it rises to unmaintainable heights in the oven, then even in there starts to droop. By the time I’m poking it with the cake tester, it’s approaching its final form. How the mighty fall. Except it isn’t a problem, because it’s just doing what it’s supposed to do. What I knew all along was going to happen. It’s only acting according to its nature. Sure, I might have been thrown if I hadn’t known. A new baker might be in a panic. I’m not. 

But that’s the type of collapse that’s expected. 

When you don’t see a collapse coming, it ruins your entire College Football Saturday. When you realize that after three years nothing is getting better and that you should have seen this coming, well. That’s even worse. 

You can’t put whipped cream and raspberries in the bowl of a destroyed Irish season and make me feel ok about it. There’s only learning how to live with a cake that nobody wanted. A cake we should be past by now.