By the time I publish this post, I will have been gluten-free for three weeks exactly. Since day three (and really since seriously contemplating the idea), I’ve been trying to write a Deep and Meaningful Post about fat acceptance, intuitive eating, diet culture, and food restrictions.

That is not this post.¹

This post is because next week is my (and The Man’s) birthday. And I want cake.

I have been assured by many, from those far more experienced in this gluten-free gig than I to those who have merely dabbled because of a non-gluten-consuming acquaintance, that gluten free cake 1) exists, 2) isn’t that hard to make, and 3) is anywhere from very tasty to better than cake with wheat.

“But!” protests my inner nine year old, desperate for her father’s signature and traditional angel food, “it won’t be the same!”

Let me tell you about my birthdays:

I was born at about 41 weeks, just five days before my brother’s was to turn seven years old. I was trying to hang on and wait to be a Very Special Birthday Present for him, so the family story goes, but my reckless mother just had to skip her daily nap and stay out all night² dancing, and I, fed up, came early³, dancing out of her at 7:30am the next day, contributing directly to my lifelong displeasure with mornings.

And every birthday ever after that⁴, my father labored in the kitchen, carefully separating eggs, measuring sugar and cream of tartar⁵, and sifting — sighs with longing — white (wheat) flour.

You have to understand: my dad does not bake. He “cooks” for a certain value of “cook” equaling “heat unflavored hunk of meat to carbon-crusted dryness and, if feeling ambitious, add sides of microwaved plain peas and baked Russet potatoes.” I don’t think I’ve seen him so much as spoon pre-fab cookie dough onto a baking sheet in my life.

But every year, at least once, often once per birthday per member of the household, he baked angelic angel food. Fluffy, moist, never too sweet, airy but never excessively bubbly, so light and sticky even the special angel food cake fork-cutter⁶ threatened to squish it — angelic.

If you have never had real homemade angel food, and think only of that store-bought white cake masquerading as it, I weep for you. Heaven weeps for you.

I used to help him, when I was deemed old enough and coordinated enough. It was from him I learned the secret of separating eggs, of cracking the shell without breaking the yolk, and by him was taught the cardinal rule: Never Separate Over the Mixing Bowl. Always drain each white into its own small dish, and only when perfectly collected, with nary a hint of yolk, then add to the rest for eventual whipping.

(We never did figure out what to do with all those yolks. Ever year we had ambitions, looked up recipes, but still, sometime in November, looking for room for the Thanksgiving leftovers, we’d find a bowl with cracked yellow crust, remains of the set-aside baby-chick-food-sacks, and we’d cluck our tongues over the waste, and vow to not forget them next year. But we always would.)

Eventually, with several flops along the way⁷, I assumed the mantle. I made angel food that surpassed the master’s. We’d argue over who would make whose birthday cake, and sometimes I’d win (and I’d make it), and sometimes he’d win (and I’d make it) — but always, always it was angel food. We wouldn’t even bother asking whether, only who and when.

It’s been a few years since I had a birthday at my natal home, and almost as many since I’ve had angel food cake. The past three birthdays, in deference to the pretense that we feed the Boychick exclusively whole foods, I’ve made darn good carrot cake. And it is, indeed, darn good. But it’s not angelic.

I’m pretty sure I could make a just-as-yummy carrot cake using gluten-free substitutions. I’ve been sent gluten free recipes for vanilla cupcakes that make me drool, and for lemon meringue that tempts me to follow the lead of The Man’s best friend, who had pies instead of cake at their wedding. But perhaps precisely because there is no substitute for real wheaty gluteny angel food, it is exactly and only what I’ve been thinking about, lusting for, drooling in memory of in the weeks leading up to my birthday.

And don’t even try to tell me you can make an “angel food cake” gluten free. I will laugh in your face, and then fend you off with Medusa’s comb. It’s like people who tell me to just use carob instead of chocolate⁸; why remind oneself of the bliss one cannot have with a pathetically inadequate substitute? With each morsel crumbling cruelly in my mouth, taunting me with its mimicry of perfection, reaching toward but falling so very short of the heaven I once knew — how could I not but cry? Better to do without. If you can’t eat the one you love, love the one you eat. Or something like that.

So that is what I am thinking of as I start the fourth week of life without gluten, in these last days of my 29th year⁹: birthday parties in the home I grew up in; baking with my dad; angel food cake. Things I cannot have anymore, and love without reservation anyway.

What will you accept no substitutions for, culinary or otherwise?

——————————