Angel Food Cake

My birthday was last Wednesday. Since Sophie has denied me the opportunity to gorge myself on cheese and chocolate like I wanted to, we had to make alternate plans. I'm not a huge cake person, but I do like angel food cake, and we found a great dairy free/soy free recipe.

This cake was awesome--it's like mainlining sugar and egg whites. Just looking at it screams "Sugar!" LOL.

As it turns out, this cake is essentially meringue with a little extra flour and sugar added in, so as you can imagine, the texture is a bit different from normal angel food cake but good--moist, light, fluffy and slightly sticky. The recipe is below, in case you'd like to try it :)

Angel Food Cake (from the Canadian Living Cookbook)

1 cup sifted cake flour
1.5 cups sugar
1.5 cups egg whites (about 12) at room temp
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla

1. Sift together flour and ¾ cup of the sugar. Set aside.
2. In large mixing bowl, beat egg whites until foamy; add lemon juice, cream of tartar and salt.
3. Beat until soft peaks form. Gradually add remaining sugar, 2 T at a time, beating until mixture is very stiff and glossy.
4. Sift flour mixture over egg whites in 4 batches, carefully folding in each batch until well blended.
5. Fold in vanilla.
6. Pour into ungreased 10-inch tube pan and run a spatula through the mixture to eliminate any large air pockets.
7. Bake in 350° F oven for 40-45 minutes or until cake springs back when lightly touched. Turn pan upside down and let cake hang until cool.
8. Remove from pan and frost with your favourite glaze or frosting, if desired.

Now, we had trouble removing it from our bundt cake pan, but did get it out mostly intact. Still, you may want to try lightly greasing and flouring the pan first.

Enjoy!

Every 45 minutes? Really?!

Sophie has been suffering more from gas lately. This has coincided with my reintroduction of soy and hidden dairy. At first, I tried to pass it off as mere coincidence, because I did not want to go back to a diet devoid of soy and hidden dairy. Hell, I wanted to start eating obvious dairy. My birthday is next week and I was hoping to have real pizza (read: with cheese) and chocolate. But, after 4 days, I could no longer deny that eating soy and hidden dairy was causing problems for Sophie. Vic and I were both surprised, since we hadn't really noticed her improvement when I stopped eating these foods. Apparently, her improvement was too gradual for our perception. Vic has commented that it's not really fair that it takes her forever to improve, yet she gets worse within a few days. True, but I guess at least this way, we were able to notice the issue. Won't the pediatrician be surprised. He's insisted her gas is just normal gas for babies all along.

Anyway, this increase in gas, combined with Sophie getting accustomed to her crib, means she wakes up a lot. We've been pretty tired, as we'd been getting up every 90 minutes or so, with a record of 2 hours the other night. In addition, as her gas has gotten worse, it's been harder to get her to go back to sleep after she eats, so we've probably been getting about an hour of sleep at a time. Or at least I have. I'm not sure if Vic is getting more sleep during the night, since he doesn't have to get up to feed her. He might still be awake though.

Last night, though, was awful. She got up, on average, about every 45 minutes. By the time I'd feed her and get her back to sleep, it seemed like I'd have to turn around and get back up. I know it's not Sophie's fault, but last night I swear I could hear her thinking "Oh, they're about to get to that deeper, restorative sleep?" WAAHHH!!! And those were the good times. The other times, she just waited until I was about to get to sleep at all.

About 2 am, I just lost it and dissolved into a puddle of tears. I was so tired and so frustrated and I just couldn't take it anymore. I haven't had a moment like this since Sophie was about a week old. Vic got up and took care of Sophie while I went to the bathroom and cried. We decided that since she was sleeping so poorly it'd be better just to put her in bed with us. On one hand, I hated to do this, as it feels like we're backsliding, but on the other, if I didn't get some sleep, I feared I would go stark raving mad. Vic feared the same; he even said he was worried I was going to go crazy. I don't think he meant it literally....but I'm not too sure.

This type of schedule has been very draining. Between lack of sleep and an unsatisfying diet, I've really not been too happy lately. It's pretty damn sad that not getting to eat certain foods gets me down so much, and tells me more about my emotional relationship to food than I really want to know. I know that if I got more sleep, my outlook would be more positive but without it, it's been a spiral into depression. I'm starting to worry about myself--this needs to end soon or I'm really going to run into some problems. I've been holding on, hoping that things would improve--and going back to dairy/soy free, they should--within a week or so. I hope.