Aloha Bakers - Lemon Icebox Cake

This week's bake was light and frothy, except for one bit, which was hard and knotty. First, let it be said, that this is my kind of cake. Billed as an icebox cake, a term I usually associate with wafer cookies and whipped cream, but which really applies to any cake that is as much cream as cake and needs some refrigerator time to truly come into its destiny.
This little beauty started out with a light lemony sponge/angel food, baked in a tube pan. Mine came out slightly wet and salty, but very workable. Next, a lemon curd is mixed into whipped cream is mixed into a gelatinized meringue. All went well until the gelatinization process, which was also around where I shorted out my scale with some spillage. Since it was clear that everything did not weigh 57555@#@$@ grams, I had to go on back into volume measures, which always makes me grumpy. Then, the gelatin just seemed...too stiff. I added a bit more water, and heated it up some more, but in the end what I ended up with were many knotty rubbery lumps and a bit too much water in the whole, which leaked out over the next few days as it rested in the refrigerator. If you look carefully at the photo of the completed cake, you can see a gelatin lump (slightly browner) discoloring the lower right hand quadrant.

I certainly wouldn't have sold it at a bakery, but I would certainly make it again and not screw it up so much. It was much admired at my workplace, lumps and all.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Cinnamon Mexican Chocolate Orange Angel Food Cake

This week's Heavenly Cake was an uncharacteristically open assignment, Angel Food Cake any way we wanted. We were instructed to take the Angel Food Cake base recipe (based on one egg white) and follow our bliss. I had already made the Chocolate Tweed Angel Food Cake for the last free choice cake, so I thought I would change it up a little. I actually made two cakes, one last Friday, which I tore into too soon and rendered unphotographable, though still very good. The second, which I made last night, was a riff on the chocolate tweed using grated Mexican drinking chocolate (Ibarra brand), Vietnamese cinnamon, orange oil, and almond extract. The orange oil and the cinnamon became the dominant flavors, but the chocolate made a pretty pattern throughout. I made the cake in a 9.25" tube pan, and I multiplied the recipe by 12, which seemed to work well.

No problems with any part of these angel food cakes, except the part where most of my quart jar of egg whites got used up for other breakfast foods while I was dawdling (read: leading tourists around non-stop, wearing a cape) on making cake #2. So now I broke a bunch more eggs, and might have to make some ice cream. Shucks.

Also, angel food cake just doesn't go well with ice cream. Something about the textures is just totally off. I bet whipped cream is the way to go, though.

Aesthetically minded types might have noticed that some of the blog photos in recent weeks have been more dramatically designed. Matt, the usual (and usually uncredited) blog photographer, has decided that he wants to employ a more intense style, and I'm right behind him as me makes me look very very good.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: High Wire Tweed Angel Food Cake

Life gets in the way. I sat down this morning to write a post about angel food cake, surely the lightest and fluffiest of topics. Along the way, a few things intervened, including a health insurance crisis, the resulting flurry of income calculation and making of physical appointments, and a general discussion of the terrors of freelancing and health care. Life is uncertain right now, the future is murky, and the career is complicated. Many wonderful opportunities are presenting themselves, to me and to those I love, but the last few months have been hard for a lot of us, juggling priorities and dreams and growing domestic urges, and seeking the holy grail of the job with benefits, then doubting whether we want it at all.

In such an uncertain climate (see what I did there, that nod to climate change?), it's unsurprising that I and many others turn to the stove for comfort. My cousin Michelle, already an excellent cook, has suddenly emerged as another obsessive baker, driven by employment worries and the the allure of precise measurements, detailed instructions, and instant-gratification achievement. From the far shore of that madness, head over heels in cake and sourdough, I flash her the welcome salute, the recognition of one madman to another. I lob the ritual doughnut at her head. She's already made a beef pot pie I'm dying to try, and I don't even cook beef.

I stay in some nights. I make light and fluffy angel food cake.

Angel food cake is one of those fun food substances that is all texture, like marshmallows, cotton candy, or pop rocks, all but the latter of which it strongly resembles. Looks like cotton, squishes into candy, tastes sweeter than should be allowed, and uses up a large egg white overrun from Rosh Hashanah challahs. Also, it allowed me to do this:

If a photo of a cake resting upside down on a wine bottle doesn't make your day, well, we have different kinds of days. Angel food cake's most endearing and terrifying characteristic is that, to avoid falling, it must cool upside down and up in the air. Angel food cake: the daring dessert on the flying trapeze.

I'm devoutly grateful that I didn't read Marie's terrifying roundup of her tweed cake disaster until the cake was already flying high. In the end, it didn't fall, although I think I could have baked it for a minute or two longer, as it was a bit damp. I halved the recipe, so it didn't rise over the pan as Rose intimates it might, but it reached a satisfying height. Rose also casually mentioned a slicing trick that blew my mind--instead of pressing down with a knife, which flattens the cake, she suggested separating slices using two forks back to back. This isn't the neatest technique (at least not yet), but it gives me great pleasure by a: working, and b: reminding me of english muffins with their fork split. Things that remind me of english muffins make me smile.

Those tiny flecks are grated chocolate, which didn't really make their presence known in the cake. They can't be tasted. Next time I'll put in more, and probably frost with the chocolate-flecked whipped cream pictured in the book. But you can't buy cream in my neighborhood, which I have to admit is very much for the best.