CityView Magazine

16 | September 2020 H ave you ever seen a cake fly? I have, and let me tell you, it is a sight you will never forget. I have always considered myself to be a pretty good baker. I am not a pastry chef. I don't make delicate, multi-layered confections with elaborate color schemes. I don't make fancy cakes that are painstakingly decorated to look like the Grand Canyon or the Little Mermaid's underwater palace. I make classic, no-frills desserts that people have always told me are delicious. Unless everyone has been lying to me for the past 40 years about my skills as a baker, I trust that I am pretty competent in the kitchen. at is, until the day when I made a cake fly. is was no ordinary day. I was preparing a dessert for our Easter dinner, which we were sharing with people who had never tasted my famous pound cake. I planned to spend the early aernoon making the cake from scratch, nothing fancy, but something that required me to pay careful attention to detailed instructions in order for the cake to turn out the way it should. I measured ingredients, I sied flour, I soened butter, and I added eggs one at a time and beat each one thoroughly. I don't think I paid as much attention to the signing of my last will and testament as I did to the preparation of that pound cake. Aer all, I will be dead and gone when my will is read, but, on that Easter Sunday, I planned to be alive and ready to accept compliments when the cake was served. I slowly eased the batter into the well- greased Bundt pan and gently placed it in the oven, taking extra care not to slam the oven door. I then tiptoed over to the sink to begin cleaning up, secure in the knowledge that my perfectly prepared cake would soon emerge as yet another of my many culinary masterpieces. I could already hear the chorus of cheers from my grateful admirers. Before I describe the near-catastrophe that awaited me, I must first explain the significance of the Bundt pan. e pan in question is neither the cheapest nor the costliest one I have ever owned, but it is the product of my long and arduous search to find the perfect pan from which I could finally remove an intact cake. While my cakes have always been a treat for the taste buds, they have not always been a treat for the eyes. I have suffered my share of torn and crumbled cakes that either fell out of the pan in large chunks that resembled the slabs at Stonehenge or that had to be forced out with sharp utensils and lots of swearing. (I confess to the swearing. e cakes never uttered a word.) is pan was a work of genius, and I marveled at its very existence and my good fortune in finding it. Cakes slid out of it like an Olympic skier going down a steep slope. Little did I know that the same quality I admired about this pan would soon become its greatest flaw. Aer I removed the cake from the oven, I placed it upside down on a large plate to cool. I had read in various cookbooks that doing this expedited the removal of any cake from a pan. Aer the cake cooled enough for me to handle it, I gently shook the pan to release it onto the plate. at is exactly the moment when the cake's inner Olympic skier made an appearance and jumped out of the pan onto the countertop. I then saw something I never imagined I would see. My perfect pound cake, my magnum opus, flew across the surface at lightning speed and headed straight for the edge of the counter. What happened aer that remains a mystery, but I'm pretty sure I defied some of the laws of physics to keep the cake from falling onto the kitchen floor, which had just been scrubbed the day before. Looking back now, I do have vague memories of lunging across the counter and catching the cake in midair. e cake that I now held in my hands was nothing like the one that had originally emerged from the pan. What had been perfect form and symmetry was now only lopsided SOMEDAY YOU'LL THANK ME The Flying Cake By Mary Zahran My perfect pound cake, my magnum opus, flew across the surface at lightning speed and headed straight for the edge of the counter.

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