The Best Laid Egg Whites

Between the pastry cream and Martha's Versatile Vanilla cake, my brandy princess cake left me with seven egg whites, which I in turn left to languish away in the refrigerator.  I didn't mean to do it.  Honestly, I very nearly made meringues one night, until I saw the bake time (two hours) and thought that it probably wasn't a project for 11pm...  After that, the End of Term sucked away my time, as it is wont to do, and before I realized it the widow to use the whites had closed.  Different people will tell you different things about how long refrigerated egg whites will last; many say 2-4 days, although Joy of Baking says 7-10.  If I hadn't planned to share the results of my egg white-based baked goods with other people, I might have been inclined to accept Joy of Baking's estimate.  For fear of making someone sick, however, I opted to share the whites with the drain instead.

Clearly my first mistake had been refrigerating the eggs instead of freezing them; frozen egg whites will last forever.  (Not literally, please don't take that literally).  My second mistake was deciding that I wanted to use the egg whites to try making angel food cake.  A normal person, upon finding the egg whites unsuitable for use and the impetus for baking therefore nullified, would have said 'Ah well' and moved on with their life.  Not me.  Once the notion had taken root, I was going to make that cake.

Not only did this mean that I had to start over with the egg whites, it also meant finding the right cake pan.  I briefly considered trying the recipe in a regular round springform pan, but researched the reason for using a tube pan or loaf tin and learned that, because the cake is so light, the outside would bake too quickly for the inside in a standard round.  Since nobody wants a burned edge and a raw middle, I would need a new pan.  Luckily for me, I was able to find an inexpensive springform pan with optional tube and standard flat bottoms (points for the multi-purpose feature allowing me to justify the purchase just a little bit more).

The recipe I chose was another one of Martha Stewart's; even if I'm not 100% certain about her as a person, the lady knows her stuff.  Or her team does.  Either way, every recipe I've tried from her site has ended delectably.  With recipe in hand, and armed a new pan and a fresh dozen eggs, I set to work.  (As a side note, here's a video showing how to properly separate eggs.  I'm sure that you already know how to do this, but just in case...  I've recently seen a youtube video in which a girl separated her eggs by cracking them into a bowl, transferring them to a sifter, and shifting them around until most of the whites, and some yolk, were, er, sifted out.  Creative, perhaps, but not effective).

To start, I don't own a sifter (good thing too, or I might have tried to separate my eggs with it), so I just whisked the dry ingredients together and that seemed to suffice.  I did follow Martha in beating the meringue to stiff peaks, although I had seen other angel food recipes that said not to beat them quite that far.

I was more trepidatious about folding the dry ingredients into the meringue.  When I told my mom that I was going to bake an angel food cake, she shared a story about a childhood birthday failure.  One year, she requested angel food cake for her birthday.  My grandma, a great baker, baked her... two.  The first one fell.  My initial thought was that maybe grandma wasn't a big drinker and didn't have a bottle laying around to hang her cake on (see below), but no, according to my mom it fell when she opened the oven door.  While not certain, I think it's possible that she'd been too vigorous in the folding process and accidentally deflated the meringue.  Consequently, I took extra care in cutting through the centre of the meringue and in folding it lightly over the dry ingredients, which I had sprinkled evenly over the meringue by whisking them out of the bowl.  And it worked!  The cake didn't fall flat when I opened the oven door, nor did it fall out when I hung it upside-down over a bottle to cool.

I was a bit suspicious about this upside-down cooling, which is indeed meant to keep the cake from falling, but was pretty happy about this new use for empty bottles (also handy as rolling pins) and the retro baking technique.

As great as angel food cake is (a cake with no butter?!), it was still going to need something to accompany it.  Since it is so unusual for me to bake something healthful (as far as that is possible with baked goods) I didn't feel like going for ice cream or whipped cream.  Fresh fruit would have been nice, but was expensive and still would have required something to add a bit of moisture.  Frozen raspberries were on sale though, and it occurred to me that turning them into a coulis would add the moisture I was after and would eliminate the worry that the berries might become mushy when thawed.  I went with a recipe from food.com, but took Martha's direction to boil the berries with the sugar and water.  When the sugar was dissolved and I could really smell the raspberries, I poured the whole lot into the blender.

And got this:

The tart coulis was a very nice complement to the sweet, airy angel food, and overall the poorly-planned procrastibaking was worth the self-imposed hassle.  Even if the exercise did result in a dozen leftover egg yolks...