I am about to blow your mind, because I BAKED SOMETHING and it was GORGEOUS and DIDN'T FALL APART IN THE OVEN and did not taste bad AT ALL.

That's a whole lot of caps and a whole lot of self-congratulation, but really: given my baking history, I'm allowed a little back-patting, I think.

OK, so maybe this recipe was adapted from a "semi-homemade" one courtesy of Sandra Lee (via People), which vastly limited my opportunities to screw up. And maybe I actually did end up screwing it up anyway, just a little bit. I mean, obviously. See, I realized too late that a cake topped with whipped cream might not enjoy hanging out in my kitchen on a hundred-degree day with thousand-percent humidity and no air conditioning (our house is ancient and has small windows and low-voltage sockets and I haven't yet found an air conditioner that works downstairs, and I don't want to talk about it because it is so hot). And there were still about twelve hours to go before I could serve the cake to our guests, and that very pretty plate that you see in these photos does not fit anywhere in our refrigerator. So I tried to sort of slide it onto a smaller plate, and discovered that angel food cakes do not slide; they collapse. Sigh.

Anyway, I fixed the patchy spots with more frosting, propped up the slightly collapsed side with a few lemon slices, and solved the melting-in-my-kitchen problem by magically rearranging our freezer in a way that enabled me to slide in the cake, plate and all. It was actually even better cold (angel food cake also, apparently, does not freeze - perhaps because it's plastic? possible, but let's hope not - so it ended up being just chilled cake with an ice-cream like frosting and frozen lemon slices, yum). Let's look at some photos, because I'm proud.