I have seen the future of angel food cake…
…and it’s a loaf. Or so says reader Chana. She writes:
A while ago you did a series of posts on angel food cake. I’ve made it several times, it’s a particularly good recipe. (I usually make a half-recipe, since I have an angel food pan that is half the size of the regular pan.) Anyway, one of your readers had mentioned making angel food cake in a loaf pan. I really liked this idea. The tube pan is so cumbersome, impossible to slice nicely, etc. I never would have thought of using a loaf pan for angel food cake. (Duh.) So the other day I made your recipe. It fits absolutely perfectly into a 14×4″ Pullman loaf pan (a full recipe). Bakes up a treat (35-40 min), comes out beautifully (I lined the bottom), slices perfectly. (I remember the poster mentioned slicing with an electric knife to prevent compression. Good idea, but I don’t have an electric knife.) I will probably never use a tube pan again. The angel food loaf cake is the way of the future.
I shall make a note of your experience in the tutorial, Chana. Thanks so much for reporting back on your discovery!
Is slicing with an electric knife different from slicing manually with “short strokes”? That’s what I do when I don’t want to compress or damage pastry. Looks like I’m a bit short-winded, but works ok. Oh, and you can cut pastry in the kitchen, where nobody is watching (and waiting for failure, it usually appears to me)
I also think long strokes with a serrated knife work well.
Thanks, Uptight!
– Joe
Did you suspend the pullman loaf pan upside down while it cooled, Chana? Did you have to support the corners? Stick some skewers in as “legs”? Perform a little levitation?
Inquiring minds need to know. ;>
Yes, it has to cool upside down (from what I understand) to prevent compression. At this stage of the process I discovered that I do not have four glasses the same size! (Except for wine glasses, which I had no intention of using for this purpose.) But I was able to wing it. As a reader mentions below, King Arthur Flour sells a loaf pan with “feet,” but I have nowhere to store another pan. And besides, the pullman pan is poifect.
Do you have a recipe? This sounds delightful!
Hello!
All the recipes are in the menus on the left side of the blog. Here’s the angel food cake tutorial with the recipe at the bottom!
http://joepastry.com/category/pastry/angel-food-cake/
– Joe
When I was growing up, my mother had a loaf pan designed for angel food cakes like the one shown at the link. It has short legs at the top corners for inverting while cooling.
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/item-img/5704_03_29_2013__12_18_35_700
Nifty! Thanks, Tom!
Wilton makes one too. That’s the one I have. I was the poster. Glad I got someone else to try this. It does work great and you get perfect slices. Especially with the electric knife. You can slice the cake in no time flat…and no flat or disfigured slices.
Since I use my pullman pan for sandwich bread, we cut the “legs” off so that a griddle can rest on top of the pan to keep the loaf square. If I make a full-sized angel cake, it will fit in this (approximately) 16″x5″x4″ loaf pan and I cool it upside down by resting the ends of the pan on two separated racks. It’s not ideal, but it will work and saves the space needed by a second pan. I think a pair of short 2x4s would work even better. Keep cats and kids away while it’s cooling!
As a point, I end up making almost anything that needs to be in a shaped pan as a loaf – I don’t have a lot of gear, and convincing my wife that I REALLY need this new pan that I’ll probably only use once a year… well, suffice to say if it doesn’t go in a muffin tin, on a cookie sheet, or in a loaf pan, it’s probably not going to be made. Sigh.
But Christmas is coming, so I need to get my list together. 🙂
Your wife too, eh? Well, far better that than the reverse. But they keep us honest, no? 😉
– Joe