My first foray into the world of rhubarb. AKA "red celery" ... the heck???

After spending Saturday at the Pioneer Woman's Ranch and watching Deb from Smitten Kitchen make Rhubarb Crumb Cake (and on a side note, did you know that Ree and Deb are, like, my best friends EVER?!?!?!) and then getting to eat a piece, two pieces ok, fine, I ate half the cake, are you happy that I've confessed??? .... I knew from personal experience what a yummy dessert it was.

So when I found out I needed to bring a dessert to a PTO function this Friday, I blurted out, "I'll bring Rhubarb Crumb Cake!!" And when I found out our Supper Club is meeting this Saturday night, and its potluck, again I said, "Pick me! Pick me for dessert! All hail the Rhubarb Crumb Cake!!"

The great thing about the dessert (besides the phenomenal taste and ginormous crumbly goodness) is that it can be made with ingredients I already have in my pantry. (Ha! I typed the word "panty" by mistake and spell-check didn't even catch it!) (Sorry, that's disgusting. Yet somehow funny.) All but two --- cake flour and rhubarb. And what, exactly, **IS** rhubarb, anyway? A fruit? A vegetable? Some kind of fruit-vegetable hybrid? All I know is when my new best friend Deb cut it up the other day, it looked like red celery. So really, how hard could it be to find? Just go to the produce section and look for red celery.

Today was my monthly shopping trip to the military commissary, so I headed with aim and purpose down the "baking stuff" aisle, straight to the flour. Where I stood for a solid minute, looking at the eleven million different kind of flour --- no cake flour. I squinted my eyes, searched again --- no cake flour. Clearly, this necessitated a call to Alisa, since she ate the same cake on Saturday and had the same recipe.

"No, I'm telling you, it's not here. I see unbleached flour, whole-wheat flour, bread flour, enriched flour, all-purpose flour, pastry flour, and self-rising flour. No cake flour. You don't think our BFF Deb was tricking us, do you?" While Alisa assured me on the other end of the phone that there really IS such a thing as cake flour, a shopper pushing her buggy in the other direction overhead me and pointed to the cake flour --further down the aisle and packaged in a box, of all things. No wonder I couldn't find it. If it doesn't have a neon sign with an arrow, I'm lost.

Then, all I had left to get was the red celery rhubarb. I'm not even kidding, I wasn't sure whether to look in the fruit section or the vegetable section, but after perusing both, no luck. I asked an employee, who confirmed they don't typically carry rhubarb because it is considered a "seasonal speciality item" but that I might want to try back in September. Um ..... that's not going to work. Two parties this weekend, and I'm on official Rhubarb Crumb Cake duty.

So I went to another grocery store .... then another .... still no luck. I was starting to get a little worried, although Deb's recipe states that frozen blueberries can be a substitute, so at least I knew I wasn't out of luck completely.

Finally, a store #4, success! Rhubarb! A tiny bunch of red celery-looking stalks, with HUMUNGO leaves attached, sold by weight. Thank goodness leaves don't weigh very much, right?

So wish me luck. I bought enough to make both desserts, and am crossing my fingers I can do half as good a job as Deb did. I think as long a I close my eyes and pretend I'm back at Pioneer Woman's Ranch, I can accomplish anything.