Backpacker - What's this 20 degrees AoB limit you mention? I suspect that's just a bad habit a nervous poor instructor taught you.
As one of my old colleagues said - light aeroplanes are predominantly very forgiving machines - given sufficient airspeed you can pretty much throw them around as much as you like. With the emphasis on the sufficient airspeed - manouevring at 45 deg AoB will only increase your stall speed by just less than 20%, a speed that you should be able to achieve very quickly with a burst of power from a normal approach speed.