There are certain foods that are such a staple of a person’s childhood that they lose their novelty by the adult years. For me, that food is angel food cake. My grandma made angel food cake for each and every family get-together: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, you name it. It was ubiquitous. In old family photos it can be hard to differentiate one birthday from the next–the cake on my grandma’s dining room table was always the same. If grandma didn’t have time to make it, my mother would. And when we weren’t eating it, the two women were trading secrets on how to successfully get the cake to shake out of the pan. If memory serves, at one point my grandpa may have even jimmied a special cooling area to facilitate ease of cake removal.

Personally, I was over it. I wanted store bought cakes, weighed down by frosting flowers. Fluffy vanilla-chocolate swirl cake. Or maybe even the ever-popular chocolate chip cookie cake. No angel food for me, please. I was moving on to bigger and better methods of rotting my teeth.

Every season, we have an office potluck to celebrate the birthdays of the surrounding months. We sign up for our dish, or, in my case, hold off to the last possible moment and wait to be assigned the salad. Based on a quick perusal of this season’s potluck sheet, I knew that lemon-iced angel food cake was on the menu. And even after all these years, I was disappointed to hear that birthdays would be marked by this dish. The clock on my life had been rewound 15 years in a matter of seconds.

Potluck day arrived. I ate my first slice out of politeness. I ate the second slice out of nostalgia. And by the third slice, I was just really enjoying myself–the texture, the familiar shape, the very whiteness of the cake itself was delighting me. It was a bit more lemony than I remembered. And in the end, it left me yearning for my grandma’s recipe and the slightly imperfect shape of her cakes. The Joy of Cooking is all well and good, but there is something about a family recipe, the feeling of a warm hug preserved in time on an index card, that cannot be beat. Perhaps a decade long hiatus was exactly what I needed. Mine is a palette reborn. I may have to start shopping around an angel food cake pan all of my own. I promise to share as soon as I wriggle the recipe out of my mom. Although, stop me if I start posting pictures of my family blowing out candles on one of these cakes…

And don’t worry. I won’t be hitting you with bundt cake tales next. Those were notably absent from my childhood. Although if you’re jonesin’ for a just such a story or recipe, pick up a copy of Talking With My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes, and Other Kitchen Stories by Bonny Wolf of NPR. Perfect summer reading.