Follow my two daughters and I as we bake our way through Warren Brown’s delicious cookbook — The United Cakes of America!

Apr 3, 2016

Not-so-angelic food cake

Warren credits the Pennsylvania Dutch with the angel food cake due to the concentration of high-sided tube pans found in southeastern Pennsylvania from the 1800s. I don’t know about that, but I can tell you I went to college with a few Pennsylvanians and they were NOT ANGELS. Sage, I will know you aren’t reading my blog if you have no comment for that.

So the last time I tried to make an angel food cake it exploded in the oven, making it necessary for me to utilize the self-cleaning mechanism. I was not fully informed on this, having not read the owners manual, assuming I even had it at any point, so before I set it to self-clean I spritzed it with oven cleaner. It didn’t go well. The whole experience was so traumatic, I blamed the angel food cake and never made it again. If you learn anything from this post, do not use oven cleaner and the self-cleaning option together. Pick one!

But I felt the timing today was perfect! Kevin and I are getting healthy after a gluttonous winter, and angel food cake is supposed to be a pretty light choice. Also, I’ve never made a meringue, so that was exciting.

Not sure that this counts as “stiff peaks”

You know Emily enjoyed separating all the eggs, and the meringue part was pretty neat to watch. We had to make a sugar syrup that was mixed in to the meringue, and then we folded in the dry ingredients. WE TRIED SO HARD TO BE CAREFUL… we took our time and I folded exactly how google told me to. I very optimistically thought about how high it must rise when baking because the batter only went a few inches high. We put the cake in to bake and tried to keep ourselves entertained.

This was Laney’s picture of an angel food cake. Yes, that’s a cheetohs bag in the corner.

This is the car that they made out of the box that Guitar Hero arrived in. It goes pretty fast if you launch it down the stairs, we found.

When the cake came out, I inverted it on a vinegar bottle per the instructions and let it cool. However, there is no amount of inverting that was going to make this sucker rise. It was flat and hard as a brick.

So we had ice cream for dessert instead and all was fine. Actually, Emily really liked it… wonder what she would think about an angel food cake that was the right consistency? We will try again and find out!