When I saw this challenge, my heart sunk. I’ve never really liked Angel Food Cake. It’s always had this stale, weird flavor to me. Everyone I know has always raved about Angel Food Cake, and I’ve thought to myself, “What am I missing here?”
This cake is quite large, 10 inches, and being the only one in my house who would eat this, I decided to make it a gluten free recipe so I could give it to my friend with a gluten intolerance to help me eat. Thankfully, this recipe is really simple to do that with. It only has a little bit of flour in it that I subbed in some Bob’s Red Mill gluten free 1:1 flour substitute. Easy!
The Angel Food Cake challenge is a Mary Berry recipe, and if you follow Great British Bake Off at all, you’ll know that Mary is obsessed with lemons. This recipe is no exception. The cake had two lemons full of zest in the sponge and a little bit of lemon juice. The accompaniment to the cake was a lemon curd, which uses all of the lemons. Mine were quite small, so I ended up needing 8 to make up the required juice amount for the curd. I may have squirted myself in the eye gah.
This cake is basically a meringue cake. Whipped egg whites and flour combine to make this a very light, fluffy cake. So the next step in my cake making processes was to whip up the called for TEN EGG WHITES (seriously, this was a huge recipe). They took forever to whip, and I realized about partway through what my mistake was: I didn’t use room temp eggs. I had pulled them straight out of the fridge and went to town. Cold egg whites will take much longer to whip up, and a half hour into the process I was getting quite worried that they weren’t going to come together. I gently warmed up the bowl as they were whipping with my hands and a pan of hot water. That did the trick!
I gently folded in the flour and plopped the batter into the Angel Food tin and away into the oven we went! While it baked up, I made the lemon curd. Lemon juice, lemon zest, and ten egg yolks went into a pot with some sugar. Once cooked up, I dropped in some vegan butter, sieved it, and that was that! I made a ton of lemon curd. If only I liked it.
When the cake came out, it looked and smelled fantastic. I turned it upside down to cool it for an hour, then carefully pulled it out of the tin. It was beautiful. I cut out a chunk to cover in whipped cream and lemon curd to try for myself. My friend has a dairy intolerance as well, so the rest of the cake I left without the cream and boxed up for delivery. She said she covered her slices with melted vegan chocolate. Yum!
To me, the cake was delicious; light, fluffy, moist, sweet but not too sweet. The whipped cream was wonderful and added to the cake. The lemon curd… well, at least my husband likes it and will eat it all. I’m happy to report that Angel Food Cake is absolutely delicious and weirdly easy to make, and now, I can definitely see why people rave about it.