Eggs Coming Out The Ears

The chickens have ramped up into just about full production mode now that the days are nearing 12 hours of daylight.  They are laying 12-18 eggs a day at the moment.  Which means I have eggs coming out my ears right now, and it's time to switch to a spring way of thinking about food.

Lots of eggs means we can have more egg-intense things on the menu.  Like scrambled eggs, fried eggs, or omelets for breakfast.  Egg salad sandwiches at lunch.  Hard boiled eggs on our salads or as a high protein snack.  Fresh egg noodles for stroganoff or soup at dinner.  And for dessert, the most egg-intense recipe of all:  angel food cake!  Using a full dozen egg whites, we only have angel food cake during the spring months when egg laying is at it's peak.  After a winter of conserving eggs, making an angel food cake is like saying "we've survived!"; we've made it through the hard time and abundance is here again.

If you've never made an angel food cake before, it's surprisingly easy, with few ingredients.  The main things you need that you may not all ready have is an angel food cake pan (got mine at a, you guessed it, garage sale, for 25 cents), cream of tartar, and almond extract.  Oh, and a dozen extra eggs!

Angel Food Cake
1 1/2 cups of egg whites
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1 cup cake flour (or 1 cup minus 2 Tbsp all purpose flour)
1 cup sugar (granulated aka regular table sugar)
1 1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp almond extract
1/4 tsp salt.

To start, take your dozen eggs, and carefully separate the whites from the yolks.  Angel food cake only uses whites, which is how it gets so light and fluffy, not to mention so white inside.  Save the yolks for another use, like really, really rich and golden colored french toast.

Next, move your oven rack to lowest position and remove upper rack, or put it as high in the oven as it can go.  You need a good 8-9" of clearance.  Turn your oven on to preheat to 375 degrees.

Now, mix the powdered sugar and the flour together in a small bowl. 

Then, in a mixing bowl (I used my KitchenAid), put the egg whites and the cream of tartar and beat them at medium speed until foamy.

Once you've got foamy eggs, add in the sugar (the regular sugar, not the powdered sugar/flour mixture; that comes later), 2 Tbsp at a time, and beat at high speed.  Put the vanilla, almond extract and salt in just before the last 2Tbsp of sugar.

Then keep beating.  Your egg white mixture will go from looking like this:

To this:

And when it gets stiff and glossy looking like this, it will be time to stop beating:

Now you are ready to add the flour/powdered sugar mixture.  Sprinkle it, 1/4 cup at a time, on top of the egg white meringue (yes, you've just made meringue, so now you can tackle homemade lemon meringue pie, too!), and fold in before adding the next 1/4 cup.  Repeat until all the flour & powdered sugar has been incorporated into the meringue.  It's very important to fold, not stir, or you will destroy the structure of the meringue.

sprinkling

folding

Now you are ready to put it in the pan.  Just gently push it into the ungreased--very important to NOT grease--tube pan/angel food cake pan.  (I couldn't hold the camera in one hand to take the picture, the bowl in my other hand, and still hold the spatula to push the batter into the pan, but you get the idea.)



Make sure the batter is all spread evenly throughout the pan, then cut through with a knife (or your spatula) to break up any big air bubbles. 

Your oven should be hot by now, so go ahead and slide the pan onto the lower rack of the oven.

Bake for 30-35 minutes, until the top of the cake is browned and cracked open.  It will spring back when touched lightly with your fingertips.

Remove the pan from the oven, invert onto a glass pop bottle, wine bottle, or the 'feet' on the sides of the pan,

and let cool completely (about 2 hours) before removing from pan.  To do this, slide a knife around between the cake and the wall of the pan, including the cone in the middle.  Then place a plate on top of the pan, and flip everything over.  The cake should slide out, with the 'top' (the browned & cracked part) down. This is how you will serve it.

ready to serve

Slice, top with your favorite topping--I used strawberries from the freezer, thawed, sprinkled with 1/2 cup sugar and let to sit for 30 minutes--and eat.

MMMMM!