Let Us Eat Cake!

Thursday morning I found myself with a tough decision to make: Should I (A) kickbox then hit the gym to calibrate my new Nike+ sportsband with a four-mile run; (B) just hit the gym to calibrate my new Nike+ sportsband with a four-mile run or (C) just stay home and kickbox so I could immediately finish ripping a big stack of CDs that we'd selected to sell to Half-Price Books come the weekend rather than have to wait until after I bathed and chilled out?

I couldn't decide. So I baked a cake.

Yes, I know, Gentle Reader, baking a cake was not one of my options nor an obvious activity for helping me to decide among my choices. But in addition to ripping a bunch of CDs, I had at my elbow a stack of older Weight Watchers Magazine recipe collections I planned to offload at HPB as well but first had to jot down some recipes from them. While thumbing through the Just Like Home edition, I came across a recipe for orange angel food cake. I'm a sucker for citrus, and I love angel food cake. Plus I just so happened to have a Betty Crocker angel food cake mix from...gads, I'm not sure how many years ago, but those things don't go bad, do they? I mean, dear 'ol Betty makes her cake mixes much like Twinkie the Kid makes his treats--built to last a friggin' nuclear holocaust so that the cockroaches can feast.


But I digress...and very well and very often, I might add.

You Can Have Your Cake and Kickbox Too
The recipe is quite simple because if you can't make a cake from a mix in a box, then you probably don't even qualify as a faudie. You're just a flop.

Ooh, was that me getting judgmental? Maybe a little. And I'll admit that I've screwed up cake mixes from a box before, often because I was attempting to make them more healthful. Don't even get me started on how many ended in disaster and heartache because of equipment malfunctions (and the primary equipment at fault was not my brain).

The recipe calls to replace the liquid required by the mix (usually just water, or at least that's been my experience) with water and OJ, then you add some orange extract to kick up the orange flavor. I'd given have a thought to throwing in a bit of orange zest--either fresh (because, hey, the pads of my fingers are finally healed after that recent zesting fiasco) or from a bottle I'd bought at World Market way back in 2000 (so you know it's just packed with flavor). However, I opted not to because I wasn't sure if having citrus rind particles would hinder the cake's rising. I can always throw some on top, I told myself.

After cleaning out the rust from my angel food cake pan (only on the outside) that formed when it was washed and left to dry (and rust!) in the dishwasher after the last time I used it (which, believe it or not, was early this year when I made the boy's birthday cake that was supposed to look like the scene in which Qui-Gon and Obi-Won fight Darth Maul--Obi-Wan was hanging on for dear life in the center shaft, which the boy finds oh so amusing in the movie), I poured in the batter, saw that Lumpy was all preheated and ready to go, popped the cake pan into the oven and off I went to kickbox.

Lumpy, dear beloved Lumpy, did such a fantastic job that I was able to remove the fully baked cake from the oven 11 minutes early. Yes, that's how well Lumpy works. 'Ol Lady Kenmore probably would have needed an extra 11 minutes to get the cake anywhere close to being ready. But not Lumpy. I found yet another reason why...

I Heart Lumpy!

Forget Duct Tape--Rubber Scrapers Will One Day Save the World
I had planned to use one of my wire racks to rest the overturned finished cake on while it cooled, but the center metal cone piece didn't want to rest evenly on it. I didn't want to wind up with a potentially lopsided or torn cake from having it resting at an angle while cooling. By the FSM, that cake had come out of the oven perfectly spongy, and I wasn't going to let some minor equipment failure screw it up!

So once again I relied on those culinary cure-alls--a pair of rubber scrapers--to prop up two curves of the pan so it wouldn't tilt:

Is there any problem a pair of rubber scrapers can't solve?

Then to Top It All Off....
I'll admit, Gentle Reader, that I was quite at a loss for how best to embellish this citrusy confection. I didn't want to screw it up by put anything too heavy on top of it (such as buttercream frosting--not that there's anything wrong with a faboo slice of angel food with great buttercream frosting), and I didn't want to detract from the orange-infused cake itself by slathering on a filling of orange marmalade or vanilla pudding made with orange extract and orange zest, but I didn't want to, well, underwhelm it by making a tub of fat-free whipped topping available. Plus I had another problem: my cake storage container was currently occupied with the remains of a castle cake, and my alternative storage container didn't exactly have a lot of space for pretty exterior toppings.

While I was pondering my options (while I was shopping for a new pair of running shoes and spending way too much money I can't really afford with the rationale that for as much as I run and with all my body's little, um, quirks, I really do need a quality pair of shoes), I recalled the discounted jar of Stonewall Kitchen white chocolate orange sauce we'd picked up at the Calphalon outlet when we headed up to Giant Appliances of Round Rock the first time. Hmm, I wonder if there's a way to drizzle that sauce over a slice of the cake without it smooshing the oh-so-light cake? I pondered as I thumbed through comics at the south Austin HPB in search of some issues of The Outsiders we needed to complete a Teen Titans story.

Much later, I realized, Duh! Why not just make a simple syrup with orange flavor. There must be easy recipes online for something like that! And there are. Or at least they appear easy. I chose one because it, unlike others, didn't call for an egg or egg yolk (because as you well should know by now, Gentle Reader, Chez Boeckman-Walker is a whole egg-free zone).

Perhaps this recipe is simple and I just screwed it up by replacing the sugar with Clabber Girl Sugar Replacer. Or I didn't have the right kind of boil going in the Windsor pan in which I prepared it. Or perhaps I was just too impatient and should have waited for it to really thicken, but instinctively I knew there was no way in the FSM's giant fettuccine bowl that I was ever going to get the watery substance you see in the picture to the left to magically become yummy orange sauce. So I cut my losses and got out of that culinary misadventure before even adding the two tablespoons (really, just two tablespoons) of OJ.

So we wound up topping off the cake with the white chocolate orange sauce, which I'd set out on the counter as I was preparing to make the orange sauce which we will never speak of again. Because it had had a chance to warm up, the orange chocolate sauce was a great consistency, and it drizzled over my slice of cake without weighing it down. See for yourself, Gentle Reader:

Looks yummy, doesn't it?

New Recipe, New Tools
Thursday's culinary misadventure presented me with the opportunity to use not one but two new tools.

The first was the...slender set of beaters that came with the mixer I bought late last year at Penneys. (I'd burned out the motor on my previous one trying to whip up some fudge for friends.) This one came with not only the traditional beaters with the thin but flat and somewhat wide stirring blades (or whatever you call them) but also with a wire whisk and a pair of beaters whose blades were very narrow, round wires. The use of the whisk option seemed obvious, but I was unsure exactly in what mixing situations you'd use the wire beaters. (Plus their lack of surface area makes the task of licking the beaters after the prep work's complete a pretty big letdown.)

Since I needed time to think about how I was going to burn calories that morning and I figured I couldn't overly screw up the cake mix, I decided to try out the wire beaters because I thought perhaps they, like a whisk, might stir more air into batter, and I thought that angel food cakes, like whipped egg whites, need a fair amount of air mixed into them to make 'em fluffy and light. (I haven't a clue, really. All I really do know about angel food with some certainty is that if you try to make one on a humid day, you're screwed.) And my batter was very airy and fluffy when all was said in done, although that might have been the result because I made sure to follow the mix's instructions for mixing times as precisely as I could for I know well the agony of an overbeaten cake batter.

The second new tool I used was an object that looks like it should appear in a cheap horror movie and not on the pages of the King Arthur Flour catalog. This angel food cake serving tool is supposed to neatly tear away a slice of cake; a knife that you must saw back and forth will smoosh the cake as the person wielding it tries to find just the right pressure to cut through the spongy cake. It's sat in my baking goods drawer for several months now, awaiting its big debut and occasionally stabbing me in the nailbeds while I was rummaging through the drawer in search of some other tool. (Shameless little tool, ain't it?)

So did this tool live up to its promise of not smashing the cake? Eh, I can't say. It sure as hell didn't neatly cleave a slice from the cake--or maybe I didn't apply enough lateral force to get the job done. I wound up using it to perforate a cutting line that my serrated knife could then follow to make the slice with less jagged tearing and smooshing. I guess I'll have to track down some operating instructions online before I serve cake tonight.

Ample Opportunity for Experimenting
The orange angel food cake recipe as it appears in Just Like Home includes instructions for variations, which I'm including here. Angel food cake really is a versatile dessert, so I encourage all my fellow faudies to play with it. Let me know what you discover.

Orange Angel Food Cake1 16-oz. package angel food cake mix
1 C water
1/3 C OJ
1 t orange extract

(See, I told it's a simple recipe.)

1. Place one oven rack on the lowest position; remove the other one(s) if necessary to make room for the pan. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
   
2. Prepare the mix according to the directions on the package, substituting one cup of water and one-third cup of OJ for the liquid called for by said instructions.
   
3. Stir in the orange extract.
   
4. Spoon the batter into a 10-inch tube pan. Do not prep the pan with cooking spray beforehand.
   
5. Bake for 40 minutes or until the cake springs back when you touch it lightly at its center.
   
6. Remove the cake from the oven, invert the pan and let it cool completely in the pan.

Yield: 16 slices
Serving size: 1 slice (obviously)

Nutritional Info
Calories: 109
Fat: 0.1 g
Protein: 2.6 g
Carbs: 24.7 g
Fiber: 0.1 g
Na: 209 mg

Variations
(That's the name of the column under which the "alternative relationship" personal ads appear in The Chron. Hmmm... Don't get any kinky ideas here, Gentle Reader.)

• Peppermint Angel Food Cake -- Prepare batter per package directions. Fold five crushed peppermint candies and 1/4 teaspoon of peppermint extract into the batter before pouring into the pan.
  
• Chocolate Angel Food Cake -- Combine cake mix and 1/4 cup of sifted unsweetened cocoa, then stir well. Finish preparing and making the cake per the package directions.
  
• Coconut Angel Food Cake -- Prepare the cake mix per package directions. Fold 1/2 cup of toasted sweetened coconut flakes and 1/4 teaspoon of coconut extract into the batter before pouring into the pan.

Now go be naughty little devils, Gentle Readers, and whip up some sinfully delicious angel food cake!