Angel Food Cake

A month or so ago I bought some cake flour and made this excellent black and white angel food cake.

I thought, sure, it looks good, but let’s just see how it tastes. I cut into it … ah, people, it cut clean. It was not rubbery. I put the slice on my tongue. It was delicate and sweet. It was like eating a cloud. That’s when I took the photo, to commemorate a successful angel food cake.

I had made angel food cakes from scratch before. All hideous. I’ve made it from the box mix. Fine, but not heavenly.

Of course, back then I didn’t know about bleached flour. Did you know they didn’t even make angel food cake until they invented the process to bleach flour? Evidently gassing flour with chlorine bleach does something to to the protein content so it’s almost gone, so … so … some magic happens. I don’t know. All I know is that bleached flour that’s been milled superfine is close enough to air that it will make an angel food cake.

The idea that some flours make better foods compelled me to expand my flour palette.

That’s whole wheat pastry flour (for Wheat Thins knock off crackers), bleached white flour (for pie crusts and cookies what won’t spread), oatmeal flour (oat cakes), a bag of almond flour (leftover from a cookie recipe) on top of the tub of all-purpose flour, bread flour, and the magic milled cake flour for the angel food cake.

I wish there was a happy ending for this post, but since the cake above I have made four additional angel food cakes. None of them have been as good. They’ve been presentable, but nowhere near what the first one was. Rubbery, fallen, distorted, no better than store-bought.

That make two things I’ve made perfectly only once: one perfect angel food cake, and one perfect batch of meringue cookies in the late ’70s with my Mom. Believe me, every day that the humidity in St. Louis drops below 50% I consider trying those meringue cookies again. Strangely, the humidity on the day I made this cake was 90%.

I’m going to give it one more try. I didn’t use baker’s sugar with cakes 2-5. I could just run regular sugar through the food processor, but why, when I could have five types of sugar in my pantry?