St Helens is the Patron Saint of Cakes?

If Angel Food Cake is so easy, how about a recipe –

While answering a question about strawberry shortcake, I implied that Angel Food Cake was like Saucyman, quick and easy. Quick and easy implies that the cake should (also like Saucyman) be relatively simple. Most instructions want to make this recipe far more complicated than needs to be. As much as I want to mock the cookbooks for adding a degree of difficulty to something that is pretty straightforward, I don’t have the energy because I am too busy fighting the instinct to over-explain myself. If you are into food, egg whites are endlessly fascinating. Today is about the doing, not the understanding, so we will skip 700-word digression on egg foams that would have gone right here.

Most authors issue dire warnings about 4 potential problems:

1. The presence of fat
2. Cream of tartar
3. Whipping the eggs properly
4. Type of pan

All these things are potential issues, but this really isn’t brain surgery/rocket science/structural engineering, it is a cake. The biggest caution you’ll receive – is that if so much as even a drop of fat gets in the egg whites – it will be MacArthur Park, with the cake in the rain, tragedy and metaphor rolled into a really long song. It isn’t that bad, a little yolk will inhibit the how high the cake will rise but in the age of electric mixers, the worst that will happen is a little yolk will make the cake a kind of chiffon/sponge hybrid, it will still be good.

Actually, for all the caution about fat inhibiting the rise of the cake, I find a bigger variable is cold v. room temperature eggs. Cold eggs take longer to whip. If you are worried about food safety or forgot to plan ahead, put the eggs – still in the shell - in bowl with very warm tap water for 2 minutes before separating the yolk from the white. Save yolks, you can freeze them for your next custard/pudding.

Another contentious issue is cream of tartar – a salt of tartaric acid, a byproduct of wine casking. Cream of tartar, because it is acidic, lowers the pH of the eggs, which in turn makes for a stable egg foam. Acid also inhibits browning, keeping the Angel Food white and tender. If your kitchen, like the Saucykitchen doesn’t keep cream of tartar around, a teaspoon of lemon juice will work.

After the fear of fat, the biggest issue is whipping & when to add the sugar in the whipping process. If you under-whip your cake won’t rise, if you over-whip your cake will be dry – not the worst thing in the world for a cake that is going to get buried in berries. For this I advise the tale of 2 mountains – Whip your eggs until they are soft peak, that is they look like Mt. St. Helens (top). Add the sugar and continue whipping until the egg foam looks like Mt. Hood (left).

Finally, type of pan. There is such a thing as an Angel Food Cake pan – A round pan with a removable insert and a chimney for even heat distribution. A loaf pan works fine. Just make sure to coat any pan with butter and flour for easy release. The cake comes together very quickly so preheat the oven and ready the pan before even separating eggs.

Sift together and set aside -
¾ cup flour
¼ c sugar
½ teaspoon salt

12 egg whites
1 teaspoon cream of tartar or lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
¾ c sugar

Add whites, tartar/lemon juice and vanilla into a mixing bowl and whip the whites, whip them good on a medium speed. Stop on occasion to see if you have reached the Mt. St. Helens summit. Once you are there, resume mixing at medium speed and add the sugar, the ¾ cup sugar not the sugar flour combo, in a slow stream. Continue whipping on medium and take the trip to Mt. Hood. The travel time depends on the speed of your mixer.

Once your egg whites are nice and foamy, you are done mixing. Fold in the flour mixture 1/3 at a time. And by folding I mean spread the flour evenly over the top of the egg foam and gently mix it in with a rubber spatula. There is a balance here, the more you fold, the more air you knock out of your cake. But if you don’t fold well enough the flour won’t be distributed properly. I find plunging the spatula to the bottom and lifting the bottom towards the top works effectively. 3-4 turns for each addition of flour should do the trick.

Once the flour is folded in transfer to cake pan and bake for 30 – 40 minutes until the cake is set – toothpick/skewer/knife tip comes out clean. Invert pan on a cooling rack (so air can circulate around the pan) and let rest for at least 90 minutes before removing from pan. Top with berries and enjoy.