Cake: Dash
1/2 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, Angel Cake. 1 cupful whites of eggs, Dash salt, 1 cupful sugar, 1 teaspoonful almond extract, teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, 1 cupful flour, 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar.
Whip the whites of eggs on a large platter until they become a heap of dry froth. Then blend the sugar with them very carefully so the bubbles will not break. Sift the flour and cream of tartar three times and add to the egg mixture, stirring as little as possible, so as to keep it very frothy. Add the flavoring, pour into an unbuttered pan with a center tube, and bake forty minutes in a moderate oven. Do not move the cake until you are ready to take it from the oven, as it is very easy to make it fall.
Invert the pan on a cake cooler and brush the cake with the white of egg beaten with few tablespoonfuls a CAKE powdered sugar. Allow this covering to harden before you frost it.
Sunshine Cake.
A standard turn-of-the-century angel food, built on the volume of the whites alone with no chemical leavening. Everything depends on not deflating the foam.
- A cupful of whitesThat is roughly 8 to 10 large egg whites. Weigh if you can: 8 oz (225 g) of whites is the target, and whites at room temperature whip to greater volume than cold ones.
- "Moderate oven"Usually taken as about 350F (175C). Forty minutes suits a small tube pan; the cake is done when it springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- Flour and sugarUse cake flour for a finer crumb, and superfine (caster) sugar, which dissolves into the foam without weighing it down. Sifting the flour with the cream of tartar three times is not fussiness -- it aerates the flour so it can be folded in with minimal stirring.
- Cream of tartar placementModern practice is to beat the cream of tartar into the whites while they are still foamy rather than sift it with the flour. It stabilises the foam at that stage; sifted in with the flour it does much less work.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirSugar and flour both go in by folding with a spatula or the flat of the hand, a third at a time. Once the whites break down there is no recovering them, as there is no baking powder to compensate.
- The ungreased panThe batter climbs the sides of the tube pan as it rises and needs the bare metal to grip. Never grease it, and use a plain aluminium pan rather than a nonstick one. Inverting the pan to cool is essential -- the structure sets as it hangs, and a cake cooled upright compresses under its own weight.
- "McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla"A proprietary vanilla named in the original. Any good vanilla extract does the job; a teaspoon is the quantity given.
- The egg-white glazeBrushing raw white beaten with powdered sugar over the cooled cake was common then and is not advisable now, since nothing cooks the egg. A simple powdered-sugar and water or lemon glaze gives the same sealing effect under frosting.
- YieldOne small tube cake. Cut it with a serrated knife using a sawing motion, or the crumb tears.
Angel cake -- angel food cake in full -- appears in American cookbooks from the 1870s onward and spread once inexpensive refined white flour, cheap granulated sugar and the tube pan were within reach of an ordinary household. Its whiteness was the point: at a time when much cake was dense, yellow and butter-rich, a snow-white cake that rose on nothing but beaten egg white read as a small marvel of skill. The method also had a thrifty logic, since the recipe consumed the whites left over from custards, ice creams and gold cakes made with the yolks. That this version names a proprietary vanilla mid-ingredient is characteristic of household compilations of the period, some of which carried recipes supplied by the manufacturers whose products they specified.