Got a whole bunch of strawberries yesterday so today I decided to make angel food cake to go with. I made it for my 17th birthday and it came out great, but not since then. Mostly because separating that many eggs is a hassle and a half and then you have all those egg yolks...but recently I've been buying carton egg whites and I realized I could obviously just use that, easy peasy lemon squeezy.
Speaking of lemon, I was out of cream of tartar, but the internet told me I could substitute lemon juice, just dump it in the meringue while it mixed. Sounded fake but okay...
What do you know, it worked!
Then you gotta decipher cookbook instructions that are basically 'mix until eggwhites are at the waxing moon stage, which you will know by the flight of two sparrows across your north facing window', and as none of my windows face north, I had to just hope it was right. Because you don't want your meringue to not be whipped enough or you don't have enough air bubbles and your cake will be flat...but the recipe also explicitly said not to OVER mix or my meringue would turn on me and summon an old god and then my cake would also be flat, along with my apartment.
This seemed about right, so I mixed in my sifted sugar and flour.
Oh I also don't have a sieve, so I sifted with a strainer. Seemed to work. 🤷
No surprise, no tube pan, so I decided to do angel food cupcakes and a loaf:
Since a cake is supposed to be 50 minutes, I decided to try 20 for the cupcakes. It was a little too long and at first I thought they were all ruined, but I figured I could let them cool and check then. Decided the loaf looked done enough too, so I balanced the pans upside down on coffee cups and then had to move them when my roommate came out and selfishly wanted to use the microwave when I was clearly trying to take over the kitchen and claim it for my own.
Time passed and some pages flew off my calendar.
And...a pleasant surprise!
A couple cupcakes that were at the back of the oven were a little scorched (that our electric oven with a seal that doesn't cooks anything accurately is honestly a surprise in itself) but the rest were... maybe a smidge overcooked but mostly fine.
(more calendar pages fly by)
My roommate and I needed to fortify ourselves to face the nightly news so it was time to decant the loaf.
(ooh)
(ahh)
Badow.
🎉🎊🍰
