The Delicate Balancing Act of Angel Food Cake

B aking requires a level of precision I don’t generally possess. Weighing ingredients, sifting flour, and using teaspoon measures would seem helpful to a rule-follower like me, but you’ll often catch me eyeballing salt amounts and adding a bit of extra liquid here and there. When eggs are over $3 a dozen, however, and you want to make a successful angel food cake, you pull out that kitchen scale.

Today’s angel food cake comes to you courtesy of my local thrift store, wherein you can find a surprising number of durable, reasonably priced kitchen items. I’d been hoping to find a traditional angel-food-cake pan and finally scored one for $1.50. Sure, I could’ve used a Bundt pan, but even for the sake of this column I didn’t relish the idea of balancing a cooling cake on an unsteady bottle.

Confused? Well, angel food cake is mostly egg whites (425 grams, to be exact), a lot of sugar, and a bit of flour to bind everything together. Unlike with a typical cake, you don’t grease an angel-food-cake pan because, if you did, the batter couldn’t get a grip on the sides to rise and you’d end up with a flat cake. Once you take the cake from the oven, you have to let it cool upside down to set the structure (egg whites are particularly delicate). In order for your cake’s top not to get squished on the counter during this part, you have to balance the inverted pan on a bottle, which can sometimes prove disastrous.

Pans made specifically for angel food cake, however, have little “legs” that hold the inverted pan up, no bottle required. Thank you, thrift store.

As I said, this cake requires at least a dozen egg whites (mine took 13) — and for pity’s sake, don’t throw out the yolks. They can be used to make great pancakes the next day. As a side note, I’m sure there’s a solid scientific reason the recipe requires your egg whites to be room temperature, but from a practical standpoint, it’s a hand-saver. You have to be assiduously careful not to let any yolk get in with the whites, or you ruin the whole bowl (whites won’t whip up correctly if any sort of fat is mixed with them at this stage). So I dump the eggs into my hands and separate the whites and yolks that way rather than the old back-and-forth-in-the-shell method. If they were cold, it would be rather miserable — like combining meat-loaf ingredients by hand.

Per usual, I picked the wrong-sized bowl to whisk them in and had to switch halfway through. Egg whites triple in volume very rapidly, and my valiant hand mixer was in way over its beaters. Though sticky, this was perhaps the most enjoyable batter I’ve ever worked with, and it dropped nicely into my (ungreased) pan. Forty-odd minutes later, my golden, well-risen cake came out of the oven, and I proudly inverted it on the counter for a lengthy cooling period.

Then came the hard part: Removal. A golden, well-risen cake is useless unless you can get it out of the pan, which I was unable to do. No amount of poking, prodding, or prying would make it budge, and to make matters worse, the egg-white-heavy cake was quite tacky to the touch. The egg-white batter had effectively glued the pan’s parts together, and breaking that bond was proving annoyingly impossible. At the risk of ruining my favorite offset spatula and impaling myself in the process, I tried the unorthodox approach of shoving the spatula between the cracks of the pan’s two pieces and pushing. Hard. The gamble paid off with only minimal injuries to myself and one largeish injury to the cake. Its natural stickiness came in handy here, though, and I gingerly pieced it back together for a photo shoot.

Crumbs and scars aside, this cake was delicious, and my students’ family (who’ve become my official taste-testers) approved wholeheartedly. You could certainly serve it with whipped cream and berries, but with its light hint of vanilla, it’s perfect just on its own.

Will I make another one? Yes . . . when chickens start laying cheaper eggs.