Lemon Angel Food Cake

It's been forever, I know. It' s not that I forgot; I just don't bake as much as I used to. Plus, a majority of the people who read this blog are the same ones who I bake for so that motivation to write a post is also gone. I don't know if I'm even going to announce this post on social media - especially since the recipe was for Easter and I'm writing this on Father's Day weekend 🤦 (which I admit was partially because I forgot about the blog).

As I've mentioned before, I don't like to be wasteful so I save the egg whites that are leftover from the Pepperoni Pinwheels and freeze them. Once I had 12, I held onto them to use in an angel food cake. This year, I decided to make it a lemon one since (for once) I had asked my mom for some lemons from the lemon tree outside their Arizona house. After some searching, I finally landed on a recipe from Two Cups Flour (which ended up backfiring - more in the notes).

Lemon Angel Food Cake (source)

Ingredients

• 1 ¾ cups (350 g) Granulated Sugar
• 2 tablespoon Lemon Zest
• 1 Cup (128 g) Cake Flour
• 12 Egg Whites, room temperature
• 1 ½ teaspoon Cream of Tartar
• ¼ cup (62.5 ml) Water
• 1 tablespoon Lemon Juice

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F (176°C) and set aside a non-stick Angel Food Cake Pan, Do Not spray with with non-stick spray.
2. Place sugar and lemon zest in a food processor and pulse until it becomes a fine powder.
3. Combine the egg whites, lemon juice, water, and cream of tartar in stand mixer, then whip on medium speed using the whisk attachment until soft peaks form.
4. Keeping the mixer on, slowly pour in the lemon sugar as the mixture stiffens more to medium peaks.
5. Remove bowl from stand mixer and gently fold in flour with a spatula, adding just enough to coat the top at a time.
6. Move the spatula slow and carefully, DO NOT stir, you want to keep all the air bubbles.
7. Scoop the batter evenly into the cake pan, don't smooth or flatten.
8. Place cake pan on middle rack and bake for 30-35 minutes. The exposed cake should turn golden brown and when you insert a skewer halfway down the cake should be dry.
9. Once baked, flip the cake pan upside down with the open side on the cooling rack.
10. Let cake cool for about an hour to allow it to drop from the pan. If the cooled cake hasn't dropped, run a small flat knife around the edges then flip upside again.

• Everything was going great - until I took the cake out of the oven, flipped the pan over - and the cake completely fell out of the pan and all over my kitchen table. Putting the pieces back in the pan and cooking it for longer didn't work. I was confused since I had followed the directions exactly. After looking at a few other lemon angel food cake recipes, I noticed that this one was off for two reasons: 1. how soft or stiff the peaks should be; and 2. how long to bake the cake. Not sure how the Two Cups Flour blogger still got a great cake while mine fell apart. Anyway, I decided to pivot and still take the broken cake along with the berries I had purchased to go with it. I decided to call it berry shortcake, although my brother Anthony had a different idea - deconstructed lemon angel food cake with berries. Either way, it unfortunately wasn't that popular since no one took leftovers home 😞