Heavenly Cake Bakers: Orange Glow Chiffon Cake

This orange chiffon cake (shades of Passover upcoming), is lifted almost intact from Rose's earlier book, The Cake Bible. It owes its inclusion in the Heavenly Cakes book to a new technique that Rose and her assistant Woody worked out to make it as a layer cake. Chiffon cakes are evidently usually too delicate to bake properly without a tube pan, but with the strategic addition of all-purpose flour and a flower nail (the thing that gum-paste flowers are built on) acting as a tiny impromptu tube, they figured it out. Or so the book says, I lacked a flower nail and any reason to particularly need flat layers, so I made the tube version.
This is the same cake base that was used for the Bostini, so it was a familiar mix. As always, I enjoyed cooling the cake upside down on a wine bottle.

The background to the baking was even better than the cake--several hours of Grateful Dead bootlegs, shared by two once teenage tour followers on the twentieth anniversary of their first show. Such a night, followed directly by an evening watching John Darnielle do his transcendent thing, was a strange and bitter rejuvenation, a release, a good thing.