THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 30, 1994 TAG: 9409290176
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Over Easy
SOURCE: Jo-Ann Clegg
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
It is 11:30 Saturday morning as I write this. For the past 24 hours I have been trying to bake a cake.
At the moment my latest attempt is gurgling in the oven behind a couple of hundred pounds of steel and tempered glass. A drop-forged security lock normally used only when the oven is being cleaned, is holding it hostage.
That is because the cake I baked yesterday afternoon exploded. So did five more that I baked in one very bleak nightmare that lasted from midnight until Charlie woke me up during his usual predawn flea-hunting session this morning.
I am now five rooms and four closed doors away from the kitchen in the hopes that I have put a safe distance between me and the cake.
Charlie the Lhasa is under my desk with his paws over his ears and a stack of pillows around him. The dog is no dummy. He knows mortal danger when he sniffs it.
In case you're beginning to think that you've read this story before, let me assure you that you haven't. The last exploding edible about which I wrote was the bread I dubbed the challah from Hades.
This one is its first cousin - a yogurt cake from Turkey.
It's a recipe I chose from the many for tonight's meeting of what a bunch of us laughingly call our gourmet dining group. I should have realized I was in trouble when I discovered that there was no shortening on the list of ingredients.
``Never trust a cake recipe without shortening or leavening,'' my old home-ec teacher, Ruth Pinkham, used to say.
Unfortunately I remembered that bit of advice too late to do any good.
Five minutes after I put the cake in the oven I knew I was in trouble. The cake began bubbling. Not the little bubbles like you get on the flip side of pancakes, but gigantic, uneven, threatening bubbles.
They appeared at random, grew and migrated to the center of the pan collecting batter from the edges as they went. The view through the oven window was one roughly equivalent to something the size and shape of Mount Vesuvius.
``The bubbles will drop back,'' I told myself. They didn't.
I kept a worried eye on them as I popped a lemon into the microwave to soften before I squeezed it for juice to make a glaze for the cake. That's a trick I learned from Heloise. I plan to unlearn it real soon.
The lemon was the first thing to explode. Bits of yellow skin hung from the microwave's ceiling. Giant puddles of lemon juice formed on the drip tray, caramelized instantly, then burned giving off a scent I last encountered while driving through a lemon grove filled with smudge pots on a very cold evening.
When my kitchen timer went off I carefully removed the cake from the oven. Even more carefully I attempted to poke a hole in the hope that I could release some pressure through the crust which had taken on the color and texture of a pair of Cordovan shoes. I tried poking it with a skewer. No luck. In succession I tried a table knife, a paring knife and a bread knife.
Still no luck.
In desperation I grabbed the shears I use to cut up raw chicken, snapped them together with all my strength and decapitated Vesuvius.
Steam filled the kitchen. I ducked. Charlie ran. A neighbor, seeing my kitchen windows cloud over, called to ask if my water heater had exploded. There was nothing there.
I assured her we were fine, then peered into the cake's abyss. There was nothing there, just eight inches of dead air space with a quarter inch of yellow gloop at the bottom.
I called my friend Kay, a lady who could make a prize winning Mississippi mud pie from real mud if she had to.
She reviewed the recipe. ``Try adding some shortening,'' she suggested. ``Are you related to a home-ec teacher named Mrs. Pinkham?'' I asked her. ``I don't think so,'' she answered. ``Why do you ask?''
``Just a hunch,'' I told her.
I abandoned my project for the day, but started in again this morning after a night of watching exploding lemons pop out of steaming cakes while Mrs. Pinkham, wearing a yellow apron and a hat shaped like a leather-covered mountain, wagged her finger in my face and said, ``I told you never to trust a recipe without shortening.''
So far nothing has exploded, but Charlie and I are taking no chances. When the timer goes off we are prepared to enter the kitchen wearing full protective gear. Once there we will unlock and open the oven very carefully then run like you know what while the cake cools to a safe temperature.
The glaze has already been made. At Charlie's insistence I used bottled lemon juice this time. by CNB