Angel Food Cake

So this week for Bake 52 I was supposed to make lite cheesecake.  I don't like cheesecake, particularlly, and neither does Jonathan.  So I decided to skip that recipe...  Instead I made Angel Food cake - Jonathan's favorite cake.  A few weeks (months?) ago Jonathan and I were watching Good Eats.  It's just one of the Food Network shows we watch.  Any way, AB (or Alton Brown) made Angel Food cake.  Jonathan mentioned to me that it was his favorite cake, which was news to me!  I decided if I was going to be doing all this baking I really ought to make my husband's favorite cake.  So that weekend we bought a bundt pan with a removable base. 

This weekend was the lucky week for Jonathan.  :-)  AB spent quite a bit of time talking about all the different things you want to do so that the Angel food cake is light and fluffy. 

The first tip is to make sure your egg whites are as close to room temperature as possible.  I had 3 egg whites that I had saved from the Boston Cream Cupcakes from last week, two more from a cookie recipe I made later in the weekend.  For the other 7 I used 21 tablespoons of pure egg whites in a carton.  I don't know if that effected my cake or not.  It did turn out to be wetter than I'm used to with Angel food cake...  But it didn't seem too dense.  I put all my egg whites in a plastic container and left them out all day so they would be at room temperature. 

Once I was ready to make the cake the first step was to make my own super fine sugar using my food processor.

Nothing too difficult.  A bit messy.  The sugar kept drifting up and out the output tube.  It was so fine it got past the guard. All done...

Then I mixed the egg whites, water, orange extract and cream of tartar.  If/when I make this again I'm going to leave out the extract.  It gives the cake a bit of an orange flavor as you can imagine.  I prefer my Angel food cake to taste of sugar, not orange. 

After mixing the above by hand for a couple of minutes I switched to the hand mixer.

I had Jonathan come over an help me with the next part... I mixed while he sifted half the super fine sugar into the eggs.  I kept mixing until I got medium peaks...

I'm not sure these are medium peaks but they are stiffer than soft peaks but not stiff peaks so...

As you can see I started with a bowl that ended up being too small.  So I had to transfer the egg mix to a bigger bowl before I could fold in the flour, etc.  Since the egg whites are fragile this might have negatively impacted my cake as well.

I sifted the dry ingredients in a little at a time, just enough to cover the top of the egg mix.  Then I folded it in very gently.  That took a surprising amount of time.  Just when I'd think I'd have everything mixed in the next fold would expose a pocket of dry ingredients.  Finally it was all mixed in.

Then I carefully spooned it all into the special pan.  AB said that you don't want to handle this too much.  And don't tap the pan on the counter to settle it.  You want to keep it as light and fluffy as possible.  So I tried to distribute it evenly and then smoothed it a bit with my spatula.

After 35 minutes I checked it with a toothpick and it came out with a few moist crumbs, which is retrospect tells me that I should have cooked it longer.  But a section of the top looked very dark.  So I figured it was done enough. 

The next different thing is how you let it cool. 

You cool it up-side-down!  The pan even had special tabs to keep it up off the counter while it cooled.  I forgot but it's supposed to be on a cooling rack.  After an hour it was ready to come out of the pan. 

Yum!  Jonathan really liked it.  He'd agreed with me on the orange extract but otherwise it was a win.  But the best part is what I made to go with it - Ecstasy Sauce.  I'll post that next.