Happy Birthday Cake!

Someone just celebrated a birthday (hint: it was me!) and what's a birthday without cake? Matt likes to make my birthday cake every year so that I'm not making my own cake. I usually help out, since he's still a novice baker and I like to know what's going on. My mom used to make me an angel food cake every year for my birthday. It was the only cake she ever made from a mix, and it was because we were under the impression that making an angel food cake from scratch was too hard and complicated. Man, were we wrong! Anyway, a few years ago, a friend of hers gave her a recipe for angel food cake from scratch and convinced Mom that it was actually pretty easy. Mom has made it many times since then, and kept telling me how easy and delicious it is. But I've never done it. Until now.

The aftermath.

Rhubarb Snack Cake

Rhubarb was one of those fruits / vegetables that took me a long time to come on board with.  When I was a kid, it was mostly that I was terrified of dying from eating poisonous rhubarb leaves - although I was pretty excited about the opportunity to eat what looks like red celery.  Cool!  I worked my way into it as an adult when I spent a week in Anchorage a few years ago right when rhubarb was in peak season.  That was my introduction to rhubarb-based desserts (how many people say that about Anchorage?).  Over the years, I've made a few of my own, but I've yet to find a go-to rhubarb recipe that I can't get enough of.  The closest I've come was a friend's rhubarb sour cream cake that I neglected to get the recipe for when I had the chance.

Rhubarb, also called pie-plant.