Angel Food Cake--a coffee version

Hello people. This week's cake is really just the Angel Food Cake Base Recipe--a recipe based on one egg white, for us to multiply to our heart's content depending on the size of our baking pan. I considered going all sorts of crazy with the baking pan option (cupcakes! layer cake! bundt cake!), then settled on the classic and simple angel food cake tube pan, which has a 16 egg white capacity. Marie hoped that we would doctor this cake any way we wanted, and when I woke up this morning to a cold and rainy day, I thought anything with coffee would be just about right. And so that's what I did.

October 24, 2010
Name of cake: Oregon Winter Angel Food Cake
Occasion: HCB on a dark grey rainy day
Constituents: Angel Food Cake with Coffee

Currently I am waiting for my egg whites to defrost. About four hours ago I pulled out my egg white stash, and even though I have enough egg whites to bake 1.5 angel food cakes, I put approximately eight egg whites back into the freezer for another day. Alas.

Many hours later, the egg whites defrosted and warmed up to basically room temperature. In the meantime, I searched the internet to see how to make a coffee angel food cake. The best recipe I found was by Gale Gand on the Food Network site. Her recipe only calls for 12 egg whites, and I had 15 (450 grams). So this is the crazy math I made up: for a 12 egg cake she calls for 1 tablespoon of instant espresso powder. 1 tablespoon is 3 teaspoons, so I divided 3 by 12 to get the one egg portion, then multiplied by 15, since that's how many eggs I had. That equaled 3.75 teaspoons, which is how much instant espresso I used. I dissolved it in about 3 teaspoons boiling water and covered it until cool.

In The Cake Bible, the Chocolate Lover's Angel Food Cake (which I love) uses the cocoa paste to flavor the cake. Cocoa powder, dissolved in a little bit of boiling water, is thinned with about a cup of beaten egg whites. This chocolate mix is folded back into the rest of the egg whites after the flour is added. I decided to use the same technique with the coffee.

After the eggs were beat to stiff peaks I took about 1/4 cup and mixed them into the coffee. The dry ingredients were folded into the remaining egg whites and then the lightened coffee mixture. All this is scraped into the tube pan and baked for about 30 minutes.

Things started smelling really delicious and coffee-like pretty soon. After letting the cake cool (and thankfully not fall out of the pan) I sampled a bite. The coffee flavor was present but not too strong. It hadn't tempered the naturally super sweet taste of the angel food cake like I had hoped. The texture of the cake was really moist, bordering on wet, and very light and springy. I opted to use Wondra flour but I am thinking that cake flour would have been better to offset the extra liquid added. Maybe next time I'd add more instant espresso to punch up the flavor and temper the sweetness. But I'm not really complaining. It is making for a really nice breakfast.

Chocolate Lover's Angel Food Cakes, previously:
Postpartum Promises, 2008
For my cousin and his new baby, 2007