Angel food cake

Some things are born of necessity.  Here's how the story goes for me today.
I just happen to have made a lot of ice cream lately.  I make ice cream regularly because it tastes a whole lot better than store bought and it's a lot better for you.  Yeah, I did just say that.  I know exactly what's in it.  AND, once you kinda got the whole custard thing down you can pretty much do anything ice cream related from there very easily.  Thing is though,  ice cream uses a lot of egg yolks.  That leaves me with a lot of egg whites.
Note:  I keep egg whites in the freezer.  I just add the new egg whites to the container for that rainy day when I want to make meringues or who knows what.
Note:  I am slowly whittling down my freezer to make room for the organic lamb that we are going to buy soon from a local farm.
Note:  I need to bake something for the week (we do our best to eat homemade rather than store bought) and in searching out what to make simultaneously decided that it would be cool to get rid of the egg whites container... I'm left with.... Angel food cake.

Please notice the little bite on the left... thanks kid #2!

I have fond memories of this kind of cake.  The packaged stuff that we used to buy when I was a kid.  It had this weird, almost cotton-candy like texture to it.  It was yummy... but weird.  I didn't know at the time that it was low-cal, nor would I have cared... still don't.  Tasting it now brings me right back though.  It's that same weird texture.  It must be the egg whites that gives it that stickyish texture.  Your fingers feel just a little sticky after holding a piece.  I happen to know that because I found myself slicing off a lot of 'little' pieces during the day today.  It's amazing though... you have to be careful though, you could eat a lot of this stuff.  Light and just the right sweetness.  I was using a little hand held mixer to make it and I ran it for a long time to get the egg whites just right.  Longer than I thought I would need to... about 15 minutes I would say.  This is definitely worth another round for me... I would love to use lemon or lime, chocolate.  Think of the possibilities.  Here's to necessity and cleaning out the freezer.

Angel Food Cake adapted from Martha Stewart


1 cup cake and pastry flour
1 1/2 cup sugar (divided into 2 bowls, 3/4 cup each)
1 1/2 cups egg whites (about 10 lg)
1 tbsp warm water
1/2 tsp coarse salt
1 tsp cream of tartar
1 tsp vanilla


Get a tube pan ready.
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F, make sure that the rack is in the lower 1/3 of the oven.
Sift together the cake and pastry flour and 3/4 cup of sugar.  Sift the mixture 4 times in total.
Beat egg whites and warm water together using low speed.  Once the mixture gets foamy all through and white, add in the salt, cream of tartar and vanilla.  Continue to beat raising the speed just a little.  When the mixture soft peaks then gradually add in the other 3/4 cups of sugar.  Continue to beat, again raising the speed just a little until the mixture forms stiff peaks but isn't dry yet.

Add the flour/sugar mixture to the egg mixture in 6 separate portions.  Fold gently with either a large whisk or a large rubber spatula with each addition.
Once everything is mixed together, gently pour the batter into the tube pan (I didn't grease it or anything).  Run a knife through the batter once it's in the pan to help eliminate any air bubbles.

Bake for 40 - 45 min.  until golden on the top.
Cool for about an hour without removing from the pan.

Run a knife around the sides, etc. to loosen as much as possible and then remove from the pan and place on a serving dish.