One of the best things Jennifer and I received as a Christmas gift this year is a cook book of Grandma Treter’s best recipes that was painstakingly compiled by Jen’s dad. Anxious to put it to good use, I decided to to try one of her cake recipes. While I have baked a fair amount of bread, I have never really baked a cake from scratch. Simply because we happened to have just about everything we needed, I selected the Lemon Angel Food Cake recipe. I found it to be both relatively easy and fun to make. A couple of things I learned while putting this cake together:

1. When a recipe calls for “cake flour” you probably really ought to try to use cake flour. I didn’t have any, so I used regular all purpose flour instead, and it came out fine, but cake flour still would have come out even lighter and fluffier since it has a much lower protein content. If you don’t have cake flour, don’t despair, however – according to the baking bites website you can use 1 cup of all purpose flour minus 2 tablespoons plus 2 tbsp cornstarch as a substitute for cake flour. That is what I did.
2. I remember reading somewhere a few years ago that for baking bread, it was really not that important to sift flour anymore as most of the flour that we purchase at the market is thoroughly cleaned and sifted already. I still usually sift it anyway just because I find it to be a therapeutic activity and the mound of flour is quite beautiful afterward. For this recipe it is especially important as sifting “aerates and fluffs” the flour and sugar, allowing it to mix well with the whipped egg whites without collapsing.
3. I do not currently have a real tube pan, all I have is a bundt pan. This worked just fine for me, but a two-piece tube pan would have worked better. With a two piece pan the cake would release a little easier. I had to separate the cake from the pan with a knife, which gave it a little bit of a rough texture – it did not affect the taste though – it was still pretty good.

The way an angel food cake works is really interesting  – since it does not have much flour, it really relies on the air suspended in the whipped egg whites to hold its shape and “stand up” while it cooks. We have all seen on TV (probably I Love Lucy?) the tragedy of a fallen cake – angel food is the classic cake to which this might happen. It is important to use a pan that is ungreased and especially non-nonstick for the cake to hold its vertical shape well. Unlike most cakes it actually needs a little bit of stickiness in order to be able to grip the sides of the pan to hold itself up. For this same reason, it is also important to cool the cake upside down in the pan to keep it from collapsing on itself.

So, if you have a dozen eggs laying around, you just might want to give this one a shot. Check out the Recipe for Grandma Treter’s Lemon Angel Food Cake.

Finally, ater baking the cake, you will have at least one lemon (sans zest) and a whole bunch of egg yolks to contend with. I decided to make an Lemon Curd that is great on toast for breakfast the next day – yum! You may want to try that one out as well.