I’m thinking of making an Angel Food Cake for my daughter’s first birthday this Saturday. However, I don’t want the typical round or square shape with a hole in the middle. I have a cake pan in the shape of the number one and would like to use that.
Every recipe I see though, specifies a tube pan - can anyone tell me if this type of cake can be baked in a regular pan?
Thanks.
IIRC, the tube pan is used for two reasons.
1 - The hole allows the center of the cake to cook more quickly. (It’s been a while since I’ve made an Angel Food cake; I seem to remember short cooking time and a high temprature.)
2 - THe hole in the pan allows the pan to be mounted upside down while the cake is cooling, so the cake will be more easily removed from the pan.
You should be fine using you cake pan, IF it is narrow enough to have a large surface area/volume ratio, and you line the inside of the pan with greased and floured parchment.
I sometimes bake angel food cakes in loaf pans when I’ll just be tearing them apart for trifle. Grease and flour very well, and when you let it cool, prop the pan up on its side. The cake pulls away from at least that one side as it cools.
Cooling the cake upside down isn’t done to make the cake more easily removed. It’s done so that it doesn’t collapse. The protein structure of the eggs is too weak when it is warm to support all the tiny air spaces. Also if you grease the cake pan, a foam cake, like Angel Food, may fall.
Correction to the final sentence: If the tiniest speck of any kind of fat touches an angel food cake, it WILL fall. Or, more likely, it will not rise in the first place. (I makes me a mean angel food cake. From scratch.)
Which would go a long way towards explaining why I tend to make heavier cakes. They only fall if you’ve done something horribly wrong.
And my angel food cakes have always come from a box, where there might very well be some sort of anti-falling mojo.
How can Angel Food Cake come from a box? Do you not make a foam? Do you not pulverize your sugar to superfine? Don’t you use Orange extract? I don’t grok …
Thanks for the info so far - the cake pan is fairly long and narrow so it sounds like it should be ok.
Homebrew, don’t have a heart attack, but I was planning to use a box cake mix - I know it’s heresy but I’ve never whipped egg whites and I won’t have the time to do trial and error.
I was thinking of slicing the cake in half long ways and layering in some flavor of sherbert and maybe putting a layer of fresh fruit (don’t know what yet) under the cake. I don’t really want a heavy sweet icing but I’d like to have something that I could write “Happy Birthday” on - any suggestions?
Bump
Just hoping for some good suggestions.
Well, I’ve only made it as part of a Weight Watcher’s recipe. For a WW thing, it’s not worth the work of making it super yummy. No point in pulverizing sugar when I’m just adding instant pudding and Cool Whip to the finished cake, ya know?
mornea, you might want to just stick with a whipped cream frosting. Add a little orange extract for yumminess. Shortening based frostings will likely overpower angel food cake. As for fresh fruit, strawberries are wonderful with it!
I often puree fresh strawberries and make some whipped cream. That’s plenty
Pureed strawberries in whipped cream? That sounds delicious. But what would you suggest for mornea who had already expressed trepidation regarding whipping egg whites?
Could she use something like Cool Whip with pureed strawberries folded in?
A bakery.
ouch. There’s no need to hit me. I couldn’t pass that opening up.
Snob alert.
If you’re going to use a box mix, well then, there’s no help for you.
A real angel food cake should not have any kind of frosting. That’s heresy. Maybe some fresh fruit alongside each slice, but that’s it. Beating eggwhites isn’t hard. Just turn on the ol’ electric mixer. The hard part is separating the eggs.