Monday, July 22, 2013

Angel Food Cake

This weekend I set out to make my very first angel food cake from scratch...by myself....no help from any of the women in my family. Just me, alone, with my mixer and a couple ingredients. Just a little news flash for those of you who may not know me: I don't cook, or bake, or make stuff in the kitchen without it coming out of a box. I'm just not Susie homemaker like my Grandma Marge and my sister Casey. I didn't get that gene. I'm trying to learn how to make stuff in the kitchen now a days because that's what wives/mommys are supposed to do...right? I have been told that I make a pretty mean pot roast in the slow cooker (which is about the easiest thing you can make) and I've even got my Grandma B's homemade chocolate chip cookies down pat.

I did a photoshoot with my grandma Marge and all the women in my family about a month ago and we all made the "Famous Angel Food Cake."  We made two of them and they turned out amazing of course.They were super light and fluffy and the crust was just falling off of it. It was amazing.

So here is my attempt at making the infamous cake. 

This is all you need to make an angel food cake. Who would have thought?
Sugar, All Purpose Flour, Vanilla, Cream of Tartar, and a shi... poop ton of eggs
You're supped to start with the eggs at room temperature but I'm really impatient and didn't want to wait the few hours is was going to take for them to warm up so I stuck them in some warm water.
I didn't have an angel food cake pan so I had to use Grandma Marges cake pan. This thing has made many a delicious angle food cake it in so I'm hoping that some of that will rub off on my cake.
I got this mixer for Christmas a few years back and I rarely get the opportunity to use it. Derek was laughing at my because I had to dust it before I used it. That's how much a bake or cook. Don't judge me. I scrubbed down the whole thing and got it clean again and got the right mixer attachment on it.
The next part was the egg white separating part. When we were doing the photo shoot we made a mess of separating the egg whites from the yolk by using the two halves of the egg shell. I especially sucked at separating the two so I googled easier ways to do the job. 

This was by far the easiest way I found to do it. I had to of course video it for my family members to see because I was pretty freakin excited about this. 
I used one bowl to hold the egg while I got the yolk out and a water bottle that I recycled after I drank all the water out of it. Don't worry I rinsed it before I used it. 
All those wonderful egg yolks and no egg white. I felt pretty awesome after doing this.
Here's all that egg white in the mixer starting to froth up.
This was about half way into the egg beating. Haha. I just picture in my head some defenseless egg in a headlock getting beat up on. I'm a dork.
What kitchen is complete without this bad boy?
Once the egg white was all frothed up I added the sugar/flour/cream of tartar mixture. I think this is where I went wrong. I think I folded it too much and made it go flat.
Then I forgot to put the vanilla in so I had to do that last minute and messed it up even worse.
You have to put this thing in the oven for 70 minuets!! Seventy! 
It seems like forever when you're hoping that the recipe that you're working on turned out.
So, this is how it turned out. It was pretty not so tasty if you ask me. The vanilla didn't get mixed in enough and it tasted more like egg than angel food cake.
It looked a lot better than it tasted.

So, the next morning after feeling completely defeated. I woke up and tried again. With 14 more eggs, 2 more cups of sugar, 2 more cups of flour, 2 more teaspoons of cream of tartar and two more teaspoons of vanilla....I finally got something that tasted almost like Grandma's. 

I tried a few things differently this time. I put the vanilla in when I was beating the eggs and I also tried a different spoon when folding in the dry ingredients. 
So, there you have it. The famous angel food cake as made by me. 

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