Last night A few weeks ago, while my gaming husband was obsessing over the brand spankin’ new Halo 3 game, I was playing 1950’s housewife.
It was a little hard since we live in a itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny apartment and, outside of our bedroom and bathroom, our one main room consists of the kitchen, living room, dining room,… baking room,… gaming room. And, since we’re not like normal people and since I’m married to a tech geek (that I do so deeply love) we don’t have a regular old television,…no,… we have a crazy projector that, after two years of marriage, I still find very hard to use!! Sometimes I just want to flip on the television and watch reruns of I Love Lucy!!!! But no,… I have to,…
1. Shut all the blinds so that any bit of sunshiney sunshine can not make its way through the cracks.
2. Turn on the projector, that is very high, too high to reach, as many times as I have tried!
3. Realize that I can’t reach the projector. I have to tell my myself I have not grown 5 inches since I last turned on the projector, so I grab whats close at hand,… usually a paint brush or a pair of scissors and flip the switch, while reaching up on my tippy toes (usually that works!).
4. Turn on the cable box… look for power button
5. Turn on the receiver.
6. Guess which video 1, video 2, video 3,…whatever,…it goes on…I think its DVD.
7. Press DVD.
8. Wait for the sound to come on.
9. Yes, it came on, HOORAY!!!!
10. Turn off all the lights, in midday mind you, rearrange the blinds and curtains, so that no light can come in whatsoever…
11. Ahhhhh…..finally got it….
12. Now I feel guilty for watching T.V. in the middle of the day,…
13. Turn it all off,…go outside.
I’m not trying to complain,….actually I really like that my husband is a super tech nerd. It has its perks,…I get all the up to date gadgets in our house, which include cool cooking tech gadgets. And, I can impress my brothers by mentioning that our computer has a hard drive with a terabyte of memory and we dual boot our computer with Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu. I’m not even sure if I said that right,…anyways,…this is not what I was talking about!! 
So, back to being a 1950’s housewife,…it was hard to be a little, happy homemaker, because my husband had to play the newly released Halo while I baked… which meant I had to bake in a half dark house, with the background noise of Halo 3 coming in full force.
But, it was still delightful. And, even though I was a very nice wife and let my husband play Halo while I baked in the dim light,…I made him pause his game every so often so I could take pictures of the light and fluffy, Angel Food Cake!!!
So on our trip up the west coast this past Summer, my husband and I visited a TON of fun, antique stores. On one of our excursions in Seattle, WA, we came across a great cookbook entitled, All About Home Baking. It’s from the 1930’s and I’m absolutely in love with it. I found it on Biblio.com, if you want to buy it!
What I didn’t realize, with Angel Food Cake, is that it’s super easy to make… and, the ingredients are so basic…
All you need is cake flour,sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, almond extract, cream of tartar, and salt.
Here is the recipe, taken from All About Home Baking
1 cup cake flour
1 cup of egg whites
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cream of tartar
1 1/4 cups sugar
3/4 tsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. almond
First, you beat the egg whites and salt.
When foamy, add cream of tartar, and continue beating until eggs are stiff enough to hold up peaks, but not dry.
Next, fold in sugar carefully, 2 tablespoons at a time, until all is used.
Then, fold in flavoring.
After this, sift a small amount of flour over mixture and fold in carefully; continue until all is used.
Pour batter into ungreased angel food pan and bake.
Begin baking at 275 degrees. After 30 minutes, increase heat to 325 degrees and bake for 30 minutes more.
Remove from oven, invert pan, and let cool for an hour.
There you go, you’ve got some serious, fluffy, angelic goodness…
