A is for Angel Food Cake

When I was little, angel food cake was THE cake for celebrations. My great aunt baked them and smothered them in thick frosting. 

With my mama on my 1st birthday. My great
 aunt made this cake for me

My mom also made angel food cakes when I was growing up (lightly glazed instead of fiercely frosted). Just like my great aunt, when the cake came out of the oven, my mom turned it upside down over an empty Pepsi bottle to cool, but unlike my great aunt, my mom's cakes came from a mix. 

My 5th birthday cake, made by my mama.
Excuse the logos; I was too lazy to look 
for a better version of this photo.

As a kid, I couldn't tell the difference beyond the different icing on each, but a few years back, my parents started picking up (unfrosted) angel food cakes from a Mennonite bakery, and I became reacquainted with the kind of cake my great aunt used to bake.

Since I decided to Eat the Alphabet for this year's A to Z Challenge, what better place to start than with - ta daaaa - angel food cake?!  And then see if anyone could tell the difference between a mix cake and scratch cake and see which they preferred!

Let me start by saying that anyone with a mixer and an angel food cake pan* can make an angel food cake from a mix. Well, unless you don't have access to water, of course, as that is the ONLY THING YOU ADD TO THE STUFF IN THE BOX. Dump cake mix into bowl of mixer. Add water. Mix. Pour in pan. Bake. Turn upside down onto a Pepsi bottle or something close to it. Let cool. Run a knife around the cake inside the pan and shimmy it out onto a cake plate. Done, unless you want to add frosting, which I have discovered I don't care that much for when it comes to angel food cake, so I make mine commando.**

All it takes for the mix cake

Couple of minutes in the mixer

Done and ready to flip over

The scratch cake was a little more complicated. 

For starters, you need a dozen egg whites, and thanks to supply chain issues and world events, a dozen eggs costs more than an entire angel food cake mix, but I soldiered on for The Cause and separated away AND am pleased to say I didn't break ONE SINGLE YOLK. I also ended up with a literal cup of egg yolks that I didn't want to throw away (stay tuned to see what I did with them).

Beat the egg whites. Add cream of tartar (which is a powder and not creamy AT ALL) and sugar and beat some more (bless you, my 29 year old Kitchen Aid mixer). Carefully fold in more sugar and cake flour. Do all the other things to end up with a cake on a plate.

Hmmm. A few more ingredients

About 10 minutes of beating egg whites
gets you this

Sifting in dry ingredients with a sieve,
even though I SWEAR I bought a
real sifter a few months ago. Sifting
with a sieve is messy or maybe
that's just a technique thing.

Dry ingredients folded into the egg whites

In the pan

Out of the oven

No, it's not a Pepsi bottle. It's a funnel
that had belonged to my grandma and
it's only function is EXACTLY THIS

The results:

The finished products. Scratch on the left.
Mix on the right.

An angel food cake made from a mix is extremely airy and light. You can see that by how much taller it is than the scratch cake. It's much sweeter than the scratch cake, and a little wetter. (Don't you mean "moister"? No, I mean wetter, because that's what it is. Wetter.)

The scratch cake is more dense than a mix cake, but by dense I don't mean heavy. Just has more body to it. Not so poofy. Less sweet. Not wet.

So how did the taste testing go at work? 

Half of my co-workers were unable to discern correctly which was from a mix and which was from scratch, but the scratch cake was overwhelmingly the favorite.

What does this prove?

Very little.

But it was certainly a delicious experiment.

*you CAN bake an angel food cake in a loaf pan (or two)

**please note that by saying "I make mine commando" I was NOT implying that I was commando when I made the cake; rather, the CAKE was commando by virtue of lack of frosting