A cake to cure sadness and celebrate spring

My sister has moved away, and I am sad. So I decided to cheer myself up and celebrate the first proper spring day we’ve had in Cape Town for weeks by baking an angel food cake. 

This seems to me like a cake for spring, since it’s not very rich or heavy and goes so well with fresh spring berries.  Of course you can make it rich by adding lots of whipped cream or sweetened mascarpone, like I did a few weeks ago. But today I just wanted the sweetness of the cake, balanced by the slight acidity in the berries.

An angel food cake recipe is an intimidating thing. Twelve egg whites – that leaves you with a lot of egg yolks. And a special pan, with feet, no less, for the pan to stand on while it hangs upside down after baking. That doesn’t happen with many other cakes. Also, absolutely no greasing of the pan with feet; if you grease the pan, you’ll end up with a thick, sweet, floury egg white omelette instead of a springy cake.

Despite all of that, though, it’s an easy enough recipe, provided you follow all the above rules. And you end up with a big, beautiful cake that is light and delicious and impressive looking (you also, as I mentioned, end up with twelve egg yolks, which is annoying. But if you're clever you can make curd and custard, maybe ice cream if you have a machine, and serve the cake with all of that yolky goodness. I am that clever, but I am not that industrious).

The cake would be much better if I could share it with my sister; but she’s not here, and doesn’t handle sweet things very well in any case. So I’ll have some tea and cake and berries in the sunshine by myself instead.

Cake and berries in the sunshine

Vanilla Angel Food Cake with Berries

You do need a large tube pan with little feet (see photo below) for this recipe. The cake will still bake in a different pan, but won’t rise properly and so won’t have the airy lightness that is characteristic of angel food cakes. It might seem extravagant to buy a cake pan just for one recipe, but there are also many varieties of chiffon cakes that need this type of tube pan in order to be baked correctly. Both angel food cakes and chiffon cakes are delicious, and very impressive-looking, so I think a tube pan is a worthwhile investment for a keen baker.

Also – this cake is much easier made with a stand mixer or hand-held mixer, although you can use a hand-held whisk.

For the cake:

12 egg whites

1 tsp vanilla essence

1/3 cup warm water

1 ¾ cups castor sugar, divided in half

1 cup flour

½ tsp salt

For the berry sauce:

1 cup assorted fresh berries (I used strawberries, blueberries and youngberries)

2 – 4 tsp icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 165 C.

Place the egg whites in the clean, dry bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment (or any clean, dry metal bowl if using a hand-held mixer or whisk). Add the warm water and vanilla and whisk on medium speed for a minute, until the egg whites are foamy. Continue whisking on medium while slowly adding one half of the sugar, bit by bit, whisking all the time. When all the sugar has been added, the mixture should be thick and glossy and able to hold soft peaks. It should look like this:

Soft peaks

Now sift the remaining sugar, flour, and salt together into a separate bowl. Using a metal spoon, add the sifted mixture to the egg white mixture in four batches, folding each batch into the egg whites carefully with the metal spoon. Try not to fold each addition in more than five times; it doesn’t matter if the mixture still seems a little bit lumpy once all the flour mixture has been added:

A little lumpy but not too much

Carefully spoon the mixture into the ungreased tube pan – work gently with the batter so all the air you’ve incorporated stays in the mixture. Once it’s all in the pan, smooth the top carefully:

Ready for the oven

Slide the pan gently into the oven and bake for 45 – 55 minutes. In my oven, it usually takes about 50 minutes. When you think the cake is ready, test it by inserting a cake tester and making sure it comes out clean and dry. It’s important that the cake is thoroughly baked through and not moist at all – if you remove it from the oven under-baked, it will sink immediately and then tear when hanging upside-down.

Once the cake is baked through, remove from the oven and tip the pan over to stand upside-down on its little feet while the cake cools. Allow the cake to cool completely, at least one hour but probably longer.

When the cake has cooled completely, you can loosen the sides with a butter knife and the cake will come out of the pan easily enough. The base will still be attached to the top of the cake – again, just loosen it with a butter knife and remove.

Ta-da! Tall (and slightly dimply) cake

To make the berry sauce, simply place the berries and icing sugar in a food processor and process for a minute or two on high. Use only a little sugar at first and taste, adding more if you feel it’s needed. Remember that the cake is very sweet, so the sauce can be quite tart. Once you’ve got the right level of sweetness, you can pass the sauce through a sieve to remove seeds if you like, or leave the seeds if you prefer (I removed them).

Serve slices of the cake with the berry sauce and more fresh berries.