RHC: Heavenly Vanilla Bean Cherubs

Or, the vanilla bean angel-food cake option made in mini angel food cake pans.

The Angel Food Cake recipe is the most "build your own" style in Rose's Heavenly Cakes, I think. Because of the varying sizes of angel food cake pans, Rose provided a guideline of 1 egg white per cup of pan capacity, gave the ingredients in proportion for that amount, and left it to the reader to scale up to their pan. At least, that's on the main recipe: on the chocolate tweed version we did back in January she gave the amounts for a 16 cup pan, and also gave a "baby cake" version of that one called Chocolate Cherubs.

I'm not fond of angel food cake. All sugar, no fat--I prefer my indulgences weighted toward butter/egg yolks. Sugar, not so much. Baby cakes seemed like the way to go for this week's "Angel Food Cake any way you want", and I used the vanilla bean option because I'd done the grated-chocolate route once. Math seemed like too much trouble, so I went with the proportions for the Chocolate Cherubs, without the grated chocolate and with vanilla bean seeds and lemon juice added for the Heavenly Vanilla Bean version. I had 4 smaller (1-1/4 cup) mini tube pans for the baking, and grabbed a silicon madeleine pad to use for the extra batter.

Enough egg whites emerged from the freezer for the recipe, saved from previous cakes. I used my mini chopper to mix the vanilla beans into the sugar, then added the Wondra flour--the amount was way too little to dirty up my large food processor. Everything else was as the recipe directed: egg whites with cream of tartar and the lemon juice, beaten with sugar to a stiff meringue, fold in the flour mixture, and pour into ungreased pans.

Results: 4 pure white angel food cakes (as all the browned bits stuck to the pan when I turned the cakelets out), and a handful of two-bite cakes from the madeleine pan. I did induce my brother and the nephew into trying a piece--my brother and I both felt "sure, it's fine, but not a style of cake we like". Nephew tried it but I got a report that he didn't care for it, older niece gave it a pass, younger niece was on a school trip but came by later to say she'd heard it was not good. Just translate that as "not to our tastes"--for an angel food cake lover, I suspect this is a lovely version. I did appreciate the little lemon tang in there, but it couldn't transform this into something other than an angel food cake.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad (from Disney World!)