Family Tradition: Angel Food Cake

Angel food cake IS birthday cake!

Waiting for frosting

Who doesn’t like cake? As a kid, it was my favorite food, a treat reserved for birthdays, and it was always the same: Angel Food cake with pink frosting, served on a raised glass cake stand. I was told it was a family tradition, and was delighted to find photographic evidence from back in the 50s when my mom was a kid: the same cake!

Mom and Angel Food Cake, 1950s

Now I’m not sure when or with whom our family tradition originated, but I do know that for every one of my years, there is a photo of me, grinning ear to ear, in front of the Angel Food cake on the glass stand. Decades later, I made the same cake for my daughter and am still using the same stand. So when the time came to bake a cake for my Auntie’s 80^th you can guess what I made: Angel Food cake with pink frosting. It’s a family tradition.

Auntie with Angel Food Cake 2022

Me with snake while Mom frosts the cake, 1970s

My 10th Birthday, 1980s

My 21st Birthday - white frosting that I decorated and a different cake plate, 1990s

Thank you Karen for this pic from my 39th birthday!

Mother herself with TWO Angel Food Cakes, 2014. Looks like we were doing berries and cream rather than frosting that year

The recipe itself became popular in this country in the 30s but actually dates to about 100 years before that. It’s pretty timeless and delicious and everyone likes it. And while baking it from scratch isn’t that difficult, I have to admit to using a mix. So did my mom, who otherwise made everything from scratch and was a gourmet cook and instructor. But she was also a working single mom and when throwing a party all by herself, she picked her battles. So I do the same, though I will include a recipe from the kind of cookbook that all American housewives would have had in the 40s. If you are not simultaneously trying to kid-proof your home and decorate for the imminent arrival of multiple pint-sized holy terrors, go ahead and make it yourself! Otherwise, just use the mix, nobody's gonna complain. 

Standard American Cookbook from the 40s

Not too complicated, but what they don't mention is how long it takes to beat the eggs!

Ingredients, including Mom's now vintage candles & holders

So easy; just add water to the mix

Beat with a mixer for 90 seconds

Batter will be thick

And it's done

Invert to cool

Cut around the sides

Part of the charm is the frosting: my mom always made a cream-cheese based frosting and used red food coloring to turn it pink. (Except the one year she made it blue and my 6 year old daughter cried because it wasn’t pink, but that’s another story.) The frosting is so good that if there was any leftover, she would put it in Tupperware and let me spread it on graham crackers as an after-school snack.

Mom's cream cheese frosting. Yum.

Frosting is sugar, citrus, coloring, cream cheese and milk (not shown)

Adding food coloring is psychedelic

Think Pink!

Frosting the cake

The cake is ready for candles! These are the same holders my Mother used.

Here's to family traditions! May you and yours have many occasions to celebrate that call for a special, and simple, cake. 

NOTE: if you need any of the kitchen tools shown, find them in my Idea List on Amazon: https://a.co/0uId9bG

Chocolate Pound Cake

Do you ever just REALLY. NEED. CHOCOLATE. CAKE? Come on, I know you do. Well that was me the other night, so I pulled out a card from my beloved 1973 “McCall’s Great American Recipe Card Collection” (oh you know, the one with the red white and blue logo with the huge American eagle? Yeah, that one. Hard to miss.) and made cake. Because I needed cake. Immediately.

The problem is, this cake isn’t ready immediately. First off, they don’t tell you till step 3 that the butter needs to be room temperature, which means you have to put the eggs and sour cream back in the fridge and watch an episode of “Murder, She Wrote” while you wait. Then get back to it. Second, for a small cake, it needs to bake for over an hour – people, you’ve just bought yourselves another episode! Hello, Angela Lansbury! But have no fear – the cake is good – but the batter? THE BATTER IS THE BEST PART. Make sure to enjoy some while you wait…

And after the 3 (or 200) hours it takes to prepare it, this is actually a nice cake, with decent chocolate flavor similar to my favorite cookies (DSers, see recipe here)  HOWEVER, since I am a very picky customer, I will point out that for a pound cake, it was a little too light and fluffy. Too light and fluffy you say, how is that even possible? How can you complain about that? Well, I prefer a light and fluffy angel food cake but a dense pound cake, call me nuts. Still, this has a nice flavor and is quick to make will give you something to do while you wait for your online stream to buffer ;)

going in...

just out of the oven

Ingredients:

1 cup boiling water

2 squares unsweetened chocolate, cut up (Note: 2 oz)

2 cups sifted all-purpose flour

1 tsp. baking soda

¼ tsp. salt

½ cup butter (NOTE: room temp)

1 ¾ cups light brown sugar, firmly packed

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla extract

½ cup sour cream

Method:

1.       In small bowl, pour boiling water over chocolate; let stand 20 minutes to cool.

2.       Meanwhile, preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease well and flour 9x5x3” loaf pan. Sift flour with soda and salt.

3.       In large bowl of electric mixer, let butter stand at room temperature until softened. At high speed, beat butter, brown sugar, eggs, and vanilla until light and fluffy.

4.       At low speed, beat in flour mixture (in fourths) alternately with sour cream (in thirds), beginning and ending with flour mixture. Beat in cooled chocolate mixture just until combined. Pour into prepared pan.

5.       Bake 60 to 70 minutes, until cake tester comes out clean.

6.       Cool in pan on wire rack 15 minutes. Transfer from pan to rack; cool completely. Sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar. Makes 1 loaf.

Quick Chocolate Cake

I love cake. OHMYGOD do I love cake. And I'll be honest, this is not the best cake ever, but when you just WANT CAKE (and come on, we all know there are times when nothing will do but cake!), this is FAST and YUMMY. Why buy a mix when you can literally throw things into the baking dish itself, bake for 20 minutes, and then happily scald your tongue on home-made cake? I couldn’t say.

Susan Katz’s brilliant 1978 “Just Desserts – Fast but Fancy” is one of my favorites. She has so many ideas that I would like to quit my day job to cook each and every one of them… well, I can dream, right? She even has a chapter entitled Desserts for Dinner. (She has also written a book called “100 ways to use yogurt besides eating it out of a container” – LOVE her to death!). When the sudden NEED FOR CAKE struck me, I turned to her and she did not disappoint.

This recipe – better than cake mix, I swear – is fun in that you mix it right in the baking dish. Seriously people, you are going to have cake SOON, and barely any dishes to wash! GET ON THIS! Even kids can do it, in fact it is perfect for them. Don’t have a mixer? Or are you just lazy? Who cares. YOU can make cake.

The only trick is that she’s not kidding when she says “There must be no delay in baking after adding vinegar” because that will activate the baking soda, and if not baked right away, the cake won’t rise. So be sure to have all your ingredients out in advance. This is as good a way to reinforce the practice of mise-en-place if I ever knew one! There: justification for baking cake: to teach yourself the importance of proper kitchen prep. (Not that you needed any justification.... )

 Dump in the ingredients!

 Mix well - and get into the oven IMMEDIATELY once the vinegar is stirred in!

You can frost this cake with just about anything, or heat up a nice glaze of chocolate, butter and a little grand marnier, or perhaps whisey and black cherries…. Possibilities are endless. You’re welcome.