Bonus

A few weeks ago, my husband came home from his job site with a bonus gift. Mind you, neither of us work in fields where monetary bonuses come our way. My bonuses often come in the form of chocolate bars and coffee shop gift cards from my students. Much appreciated, indeed! My husband's bonuses tend to come in the form of homeowner surpluses. Jars of fresh honey, bags of sweet corn and loaves of banana bread have been enjoyed by us throughout the years. Our recent gift came in the form of farm fresh eggs, two and a half dozen to be precise. I love eggs but also know that there are only so many egg bakes one can make before interest wanes.

Suddenly, I had a flashback from my youth. We grew up with eggs, lots and lots of them. The upper level of our barn was designated to the laying hens. Woe be it to the child who had to face that bunch of cackling, pecking and irritable chickens for removal of the eggs. Fortunately, I escaped the egg gathering assignment for the most part but rarely missed the chore of casing all the eggs for pick up by the creamery guy. We learned to pick up several eggs at a time and gingerly deposit them in the slots of large cases. Dropping an egg was a disaster, not so much for the loss of monetary value, but the nasty clean up process. Broken eggs are slippery little devils.

In the summer we added another level of egg collection to our duties. The baby chicks were now old enough to be called pullets and the females were laying small eggs all around the farm. My mother paid us for the eggs we brought to her. She rarely paid us for farm duties so it must have been worth it to her to get the eggs cleaned up and removed from the property. We would sneak around looking for egg jackpots. If we found a nest, we went to great lengths to hide the location from our siblings. I am sure we weren't paid more than a dime or two per dozen, but that was big bucks to us.

Needless, to say we had a lot of eggs in the summertime. A favorite way to use the eggs was to make cake. We had a recipe for Butter Sponge Cake that used one dozen egg yolks and a recipe for Angel Food Cake needed one dozen egg whites. And there was no problem getting rid of two cakes in a family of nine.

So, when my husband presented me with the egg surplus, I decided to take a step back in time and make the two cakes of my youth. Fortunately, I had saved both recipes (the cards were in good shape, imagine that). The Butter Sponge Cake turned out just as I remembered and the taste immediately brought me back to the farm. The Angel Food Cake did not rise to all its fluffy glory (in defense of myself, I used a loaf pan rather than a tube pan), but the taste was still there. We are not a family of nine, but somehow we had no problem finishing off the cakes, with a little help from a few friends.

The moral of this post is: If life gives you eggs, make cake.