#because monocots have cereals bananas and coconuts and other palms

[miminmimikyu]

thinking about @plant-taxonomy-showdown's angiosperm cake poll and im contemplating how possible it is to bake a cake using ~~only~~ ingredients obtained from monocots (OR eudicots, but i've got that one figured out i think). i'm currently stumped by how you get air into that sucker without chemical leavening agents (aquafaba comes from eudicots so that's out).

so the solution would be like

bake something that's supposed to be dense, like ginger cake or banana bread. but the thought of making any of these without cinnamon is making me sad

stretch the definition of cake. maybe a pie is possible…?

reaaaaaaaaaaally stretch the definition of monocot-derived ingredient. like. what if i make ginger beer and use its CO2. that definitely can work (i've used cola as a leavening agent before). but then i'm relying on epidermally associated yeasts to make me the CO2, that feels like cheating.

but in theory, someone could run into a maize field at dusk, tie plastic bags around some (thousands) of plants, harvest the air before dawn, extract the CO2, pressurize it enough to blast it into water and then give me that carbonated water to use. does that count. plants make CO2 in the Kreb’s cycle so does it matter that the ginger beer's CO2 comes from a yeast digesting the ginger's glucose and not from the ginger burning its glucose how do you (imaginary arbiter of monocot cake law) know a yeast did it and not me breaking into a field at night with 10000 plastic bags i'm getting off track now.