One of the best recipes you’ve never heard of is Hot Milk Sponge Cake: because angel food cake sucks! Well—because it’s everything you wish angel food would be. It’s spongey and fluffy and tall, with a light, eggy crust, but it doesn’t melt in your mouth like cotton candy, and it’s not so cloyingly sweet.

We first learned about this recipe from one of our TV viewers Linda White, who asked us to recreate her grandmother’s cake from sketchy notes on our show “My Family Recipe.” Old-fashioned, light and tender, and flavored with a little orange zest, it made us feel nostalgic ourselves.

Chris also seized the opportunity to prove his point about under-whipping egg whites. Ignore everybody’s direction about stiff peaks, in most cases. Under-beat your whites just until a soft peak folds over on itself. Stiff peaks get over-whipped when they’re incorporated into the batter, they lose air pockets, and you won’t get the towering glory you’re trying to achieve with this cake.

And “My Family Recipe” is coming to public television in October! Find your local station on our website at 177milkstreet.com/tv/stations.