Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Angel Food Fix

lemon angel food cake
Here it is more than a month after my "oops!" with the Brown Sugar Angel Food Cake and I hadn't done anything with the erroneous flour-sugar combo other than pack it up and stuff it in the pantry. Didn't want to waste it, but it sure would have been helpful to have noted how much flour and sugar was actually in there. All I remember is that I had measured some of the sugar in with the sifted flour before realizing that it was the wrong kind of sugar.

...and it's been staring at me from the pantry shelf ever since.

The first thing to do was to go back to the beginning (a very good place to start).* I got out the Brown Sugar Angel Food Cake recipe thinking that if nothing else, I could just try the same recipe using regular sugar or a combination. On the following page was a Lemon Angel Food Cake filled with lemon curd. That would be a sweet way to deal with all those extra yolks!

Alas, I used my only two lemons on the rum cake disaster last weekend. However, I noticed that the only difference between the lemon and brown sugar cake recipes (other than the type of sugar) was the addition of lemon zest. So you could say, I made the Brown Sugar Angel Food Cake with white sugar. Or did I make the Lemon Angel Food Cake without the lemon? All of the amounts were identical. For instance, the eggs. Fourteen of them. Leaving me once again with... 14 egg yolks looking for a purpose. Stay tuned.

Adapted from Lemon Angel Food Cake, page 510, The Martha Stewart Cookbook, 1995

Notes: I measured out the flour/sugar combo into another bowl and subtracted the known quantity of the flour. From that I was able to determine how much sugar was in there and add to it. Since I didn't have anything to make a sauce with for this one, I was worried that the cake would be too plain by itself. It was too late to sub cocoa powder for some of the flour (darn), but I looked up a basic angel food recipe** and added 1 tsp of vanilla and 1/2 tsp of almond extract according to that recipe. Baked it for 50 min. Could have gone maybe 5 more. Not sure I'm in love with the almond flavor, but overall it's lovely cake, and I would happily serve it to people I like.

*Everything I need to know about life... I learned from The Princess Bride (and The Sound Of Music).
**Angel Food Cake, page 725, How To Cook Everything, Mark Bittman, 1998
Blog Widget by LinkWithin
 

0 COMMENTS:

Post a Comment

Take a moment to say "Howdy!"... I'd love to hear from you!