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Claire Makes Angel Food Cake | From the Test Kitchen | Bon Appétit

Apr 09, 2020
I'm on a mission to rescue

angel

food

cake

from the kind of staid grandma dessert that people associate with being too sweet and a bit fluffy and really bring it back because I think it's a wonderful dessert with a really special texture. and it's such a pretty canvas for whatever seasonal fruit you have on hand, especially for summer with all the berries and stone fruits. I think it's a really nice dessert to try if you've never made it before, so

angel

food

cake

a lot of people probably had. but I think it's most likely not a recipe that many people have made before because it requires a special pan, it requires two pans, which is what you want for this recipe is an aluminum pan like this, I don't want to use a nonstick for the frying pan, I really don't know why they make them now.
claire makes angel food cake from the test kitchen bon app tit
Angel food cake is a spongy meringue-based cake. Meringue means that it is mixed with a mixture of egg whites and sugar, so I have one in three-quarters cup of egg. Whites You'll have to break between a dozen and 14 large eggs to get this mini egg white, so you'll have plenty of yolks left over. An important tip is that you want to make sure that the bowl of your mixer is really clean, but it doesn't have any grease because that will make it harder to whip a light meringue, we'll leave it there for now because I have to mix my dry ingredients first.
claire makes angel food cake from the test kitchen bon app tit

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claire makes angel food cake from the test kitchen bon app tit...

I have cake flour, so cake flour is the ticket here. and I'm just going to mix it with a little bit of powdered sugar and powdered sugar is nice as a stabilizing agent because we want to make sure that the meringue retains all the air that we're going to beat in, it's always good to Sift the cake flour because there can be quite a bit left. lumpy and now I'm going to bring I'm going to start mixing everything in the bowl. I'm going to start with the egg whites now before I start beating this I'm going to add my cream. of tartar and it is an acid.
claire makes angel food cake from the test kitchen bon app tit
The acids act as a stabilizer for the egg whites and a little salt. The first thing you want to do when you're beating egg whites is to mix them on low heat just to break up and liquefy that dough. of whites, so eventually these egg whites will be a dramatic transformation. We moved on from these trends, you know, white liquid egg whites in the bowl. I'm going to scoop this into a meringue that's almost at the top of the bowl, so I'm going to increase the speed a little bit now that they're getting nice and foamy and once I start to see a little bit of air in the wipes, I can see this pretty white foam.
claire makes angel food cake from the test kitchen bon app tit
I'm going to start adding my granulated sugar and I want to add This in very slowly. I want to be able to see the individual Graeme's sort of cascading into the bowl. If I added all this sugar at once, they would really overwhelm the meringue and I wouldn't be able to get the kind of volume I want. just so you know this is a cake that does not have baking powder it does not have baking powder it does not have baking soda all the lightness of this cake comes from the air that I am beating with the egg whites, you can see that they have almost quadrupled in volume, okay, That's all the sugar.
Now I want to continue beating this on high speed until I get to the point where the egg whites are stiff and glossy and form a firm peak, so I'll show you. you know exactly what it looks like and now I'm at the stage where the whites go to the top of the whisk so I want to be careful because it's easy to over beat at this stage so at this stage also because the volume of the bowl it's so high that there's kind of a dead zone around the top of the whisk where not all of the egg white reaches, so I want to mix it in a little by hand.
I'm going to go a little further so that there is a fallen peak, we are close and at this stage again it is very easy to overbeat. If you beat the egg whites too much, they start to look almost curdled, like they're turning soft. of a certain texture and then it's very difficult to incorporate the dry ingredients, so one thing that I also like to do when I have a dead zone like this is to lift the whisk a little bit and then you will see that it starts to see. the marks with a whisk is when you have that ring of meringue that is not built into the bowl and that you can easily pass through so here we are this is a firm peak it sounds like a bird's beak voici it is a dense foam this is what I want Now before I take the bowl out of the mixer, I'm going to add a very small amount of liquid in the form of vanilla extract for flavor and two tablespoons of lemon juice.
This serves a couple of purposes: one, vanilla flavored lemon juice. The lemon juice adds a little bit of tartness which I think balances out what can be a kind of overwhelming sweetness in the cake, so I remove the bowl from the mixer so I can sift the dry ingredients on top. this in thirds, so I'm just sifting it to remove any lumps on top of the meringue and then I'll let the mixer do the job of evenly incorporating the dry ingredients into the meringue, but the idea at this point is still to mix it as little as possible, yeah, so I have my oven on 325, once you have all the ingredients together the cake comes together relatively quickly and you want to put it in the oven if you want to work with someone at a speed because the idea is not to let the whites deflate too much, that is the last of the dry ingredients.
I want to take out the bowl and fold everything by hand several times. I have a large, flexible spatula. I'm looking for bags of dry ingredients that have It hasn't been incorporated and I just want to make sure everything is smooth and well mixed and I'm using this folding technique where you make big strokes and scrape from the bottom and fold and that's a gentle way to mix. To avoid losing too much volume, I'm only going to pour in about half the batter because one thing that happens with angel food cake is often that the batter is so light that they form like weird air pockets. generally the dough would fall on itself and trap air, so I can use a spatula or a spoon and I'm just trying to get the dough around the base of the cake and at those right angles where the bottom meets the sides , both the two and the outside sides, and this is to eliminate air bubbles and I even like to work it down the sides and down the tube and it forms a small depression in the center, but Again, this is the best way to avoid large airbags.
Another arrest is the batter and I pour it all over the pan. If you pour it completely on one side, then it is difficult to distribute the dough evenly. This is a really fun dough. To work now I'm just using the same little spatula to smooth it all out and again I try to work it in to avoid air pockets and then I want to do my best to smooth it out until I get a super level surface. Well, that's what you see. well I would say it looks good and then I used it for several more minutes okay in my 325 oven at 35 to 40.
I'll check again. I'm looking for a uniform gold color, it will be very striking. It's going to be a crack in the Electra Center or a ring and it's going to spring back when you press down on the center, so okay, the cake is ready to come out and I'm going to show you the best way to cool it. This angel food pan has these little stilts that are designed to cool the cake, so the cake needs to cool upside down. There is very little structure to the cake and it is so light and there is so much air that if you cooled it upright it would collapse under its own weight. so it has very high sides, so to cool it it must be upside down.
If your pan has these little stilts you can do it this way, but another good trick is sometimes to use the pan, so make sure the older ones don't have them. a wine bottle and you just put the neck of the wine bottle through the center hole, but this way now the cake won't fall because we didn't grease the sides, so it sits pretty firm there and that's one of the reasons why that you don't do it. If you want to use a non-stick pan, use this light colored aluminum to set because in a non-stick pan you run the risk of everything coming out, like my mom did before, so this will have to cool for at least two hours like this, so you want to be able to touch the sides and not have any heat or V coming from the cake, so after a couple of hours I took the cake off the cake with a bottle of wine and it's here, but before Molden, I'm going to mix my ingredients.
I have a lot of berries here. I have very beautiful strawberries, blackberries and raspberries, so I'm going to let the berries macerate, but I'm actually going to do strawberries and blackberries, not raspberries because those raspberries don't tend to release a lot of juice. They will simply soften and become mushy. I'll eat them because you really have to expose the flesh of the fruit to release the juices and macerating the fruit just means mixing it with a little bit of sugar and the sugar draws out the juices and then you get this beautiful syrup that you can drizzle around the cake.
I always think about my mom's angel food cake that we would have for special occasions and I think she would just make it. I think she just likes him. frozen strawberries thawed and sweetened, it's delicious, just remember that it's like the most delicious dessert plus whipped cream. Now I'm going to eat some blackberries too and these are eaten lengthwise, that way they are prettier and I always like them with macerations. fruit, it's always good to add a little bit of fresh fruit at the end to have a combination of fruit that's a little softer and juicier and then fruit that's super fresh, so I'm just going to mix them in with maybe a tablespoon or two. of sugar just enough to sweeten them slightly, if you're using seasonal fruit it should already be a little sweet, you can also add a splash of lemon juice which might be nice and that

makes

it all work, but that's it. just let them sit here and hang out and eventually the juices will dry out.
Thanks, just add a little lemon and sugar to bring out the fruit flavors. I mean, you can let this sit for as little as ten minutes. only a few hours so I have very cold cream here I'm not going to sweeten the cream because angel food cake is already a pretty sweet dessert the berries are lightly sweetened so I always like a desert where there is a contrast between something sweet and not sweet, yes, the bowl is cold, a metal bowl works well because it goes down very quickly, you can whip the cream in a mixer, that's fine, the only thing about a mixer is that the cream goes from lightly whipped to over whipped and very fast, so I want to sit there and watch it.
I have no idea how people beat meringue by hand. I never did it by hand. It's starting to thicken now, so I can be a little more vigorous when whisking it. You can see I started to splatter. a little bit I also like to sometimes hold the bowl a little bit lower because I think I have better leverage with my arm so you're not stirring the cream you're whipping it so the idea is to whip it in the air , so you should listen. the whip hits the inside of the bowl, it's fine, it's gently whipped, so since the pan wasn't greased, I'm going to have to cut it all the way through to get the cake out, so I like to use a little offset spatula that you could use. a butter knife that also works or a paring knife that pushes all the way down and then

makes

a sort of sawing motion as I rotate the pan so cutting all the way through will allow me to get the inside of the tube out, tilt it yeah depending in your oven and heat conduction, like I made this cake where it browned a lot more around the top and sides, but it's fully baked, as long as your end point indicators are ready, the

test

er comes out clean and it's nice and elastic then that's it, and now I want to cut around the inner ring the same way, so the final step is to cut around the bottom between the cake and the base of the tube, so I'm applying a lot of downward pressure so it doesn't end up cutting into the cake and then once you do, everything should come off relatively easily.
You can use two spatulas to lift it up, but I think I can actually flip everything over a little bit. a little bit and then rise all right everything I like about angel food cake has to do with the texture, it's so fluffy and cloud-like and it's like a literal sponge for other flavors that we're going to place on a cake plate angel whenever you have something that is very airy, soft and easy to compress, it's a good idea to use a serrated knife so you don't end up flattening everything, it's just little sawing motions and I like a big piece of angel food cake. because in my head and like it's mostly air, angel food cake was definitely something that existed in the '90s because it's fat-free, which has nothing to do with why I like it, but it was something that we had a lot of, I think that all.
So here's a look inside, it looks so good, it's so uniform, like there's a tight structure, but it's so light that you know there's almost weightlessness to the slice, so I'd say a cake like this feeds generously. to eight people. If no one wants a second slice, then my favorite way to eat angel food cake is the way I ate it as a kid, which is with whipped cream and berries, so this is our smooth, delicious whipped cream and I like to go right on. but I'm actually going to make berries first, so first let me add some of these raspberries.
Now I'm going tousing berries first because I want direct contact with the cake so it can absorb some of the juices because I really cut into it. so it's not really a flat surface that you're going to roll on, they're going to roll right away, but oh well, you kind of drip the juices, yeah, well, I'm going to put whipped cream on there, so I'll be fine. I love it, I really like this combination of berries and then a super soft cloud and I really like the whole cream. There are some pretty big chunks, so I'm going to ask for help.
Have you been interested in eating angel food cake? Keep talking, just talk to the camera. No, very high. You have a difficult pass. Okay, sit here and eat the cake. Myself it's so good Hi, maybe this angel food cake very Claire style in the 90s when sugar was okay and now it's the complete opposite so thank you very much yes that's coming back. Oh the fat is definitely back, yes there is definitely sugar present. but it doesn't hit you like it's definitely right, you don't have to like drinking a glass of water after knowing that I destroy.
Thanks Claire, you're welcome, take that away. I'll take the rest of this with me. It's a lot of fun, just a cool office, right? I absolutely think it's worth investing in two pans just to make angel food cake, of course you can do other things in it too, but it's a wonderful summer dessert, relatively easy and quick, but really, when done right, it's a dessert that has a texture unlike anything else, so I think it's really special. I just think angel food cake is a special dessert, it's so light that there's really nothing else that has this texture and I hope we can make it.
Bring it back maybe I just consider it a 90's dessert. No one else considers it that way, but it's really fun to eat and also fun to make, so I hope you give it a try and take advantage of some delicious summer fruits. fighting for the jump what I like about it, but where is my body? It keeps for a long time yes, there is nothing to be afraid of sugar, something to be afraid of

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