Let 'em eat cake!

When life gives you egg whites, make angel-food cake. At 5:30 a.m. on a school day. Because that's when the oven is available.

Okay, I'll admit that my cake-making has gotten a little out of control, but I'm just trying to build a dike to hold back the flood of egg whites and keep the chickens from coming home to roost in my refrigerator, just to mix a few metaphors. (Would I rather mix metaphors or egg whites? Don't distract me from the issue at hand, which is what to do with these dirty beaters....)

The problem is that the resident bread-baker keeps using egg yolks and leaving the whites in little plastic quart containers in the fridge, and when the containers start stacking up, I whip up an angel-food cake. They sell well at the Farmers' Market, but I have to bake them right about the time that the oven is full of bread, which doesn't work, or else squeeze them in at unusual times like 5:30 a.m., which is what I did last Friday. And then when I explained to my students why I had been up since the crack of dawn, they said, "Bake one for us!"

Well, I've got all those egg whites, right? And I can't eat all that cake myself, right? So I baked a cake for my students. Served it with strawberries in this morning's class. They enjoyed it, but now they'll be expecting cake all the time. That's what's happened with the Farmers' markets: I started baking cakes just to clear space in the fridge, but now we have customers who complain if cake is not forthcoming.

Maybe I'll start sending the raw egg whites to the market with recipes attached. Let 'em bake cake! I'm going back to sleep.