The treats most people gobble down during holiday festivities usually tote a potent load of calories, fat and cholesterol.
So for those people who are watching their weight or trying to eat sensibly during the annual feeding season, a serving of Aunt Emma’s old-fashioned chocolate layer cake could linger long after the pleasure of eating it has gone.
Luckily, some holiday desserts taste indulgent, yet won’t make revelers feel like they’ve swallowed a lump of coal.
Angel food – sometimes called angel cake – is a luscious, low-calorie cake that contains only a smidgen of fat and no cholesterol. A big slice of angel food cake usually contains less than a gram of fat and about 200 calories; a little slice of Aunt Emma’s chocolate cake usually contains more than 16 grams of fat and about 370 calories.
The difference is in the ingredients. Angel food consists of little more than egg whites, flour, sugar and air.
(Egg whites are the clear, protein-rich portion of the egg and don’t contain fat or cholesterol. The fat and cholesterol are contained in the yellow yolk of the egg.) Using an electric mixer, the egg whites are whipped until they fluff up with air. Then, sugar is beaten in until the whites form a glossy meringue.
Next, sifted cake flour is gently folded in to bind the mixture into a delicate foam. No butter or shortening are added. When the foam mixture is baked in a round tube pan, the expanding steam in the egg whites pushes the airy batter upward to create a high-rise halo.
Sugar sweetens the mixture but it also makes the cake tender. If sugar were left out of the equation, the result would be a tough, rubbery and sticky cake.
Angel food is as versatile a dessert as it is simple to make. Using a single, basic recipe, a cook can conjure up a heavenly host of different cakes by adding spices and flavorings. Most flavorings change the taste but don’t add calories or fat.
For example, ground almonds or pecans will give angel food cake a nutty crunch and toasty flavor and add only 25 calories. Unsweetened cocoa turns the snow-white cake batter into a dark-chocolate delight for a mere 26 additional calories.
However, a dash of caramelized almond sugar (praline) will give the cake a delicious French toffee flavor and add 119 calories.
History is slim on this angelic confection. However, most food authorities, including the French food bible, Larousse Gastronomique, credit the United States as the cake’s birthplace.
Susan G. Purdy, a cooking teacher in Connecticut wrote in her book, A Piece of Cake (Macmillan Publishing, 1989, $24.95), that the recipe was developed in the ovens of the Pennsylvania Dutch during the 19th century.
Yet, one Pennsylvania Dutch cookbook author, Betty Groff, said she believes the recipe was developed much earlier. Groff claims she has angel food recipes in her family archives that date back to 1790.
She said her thrifty Mennonite ancestors invented the cake recipe to use up egg whites left over after making egg noodles. (The Mennonites are a religious sect in Pennsylvania.) Recipes for the cake soon became a source of friendly rivalry between Mennonite cooks, Groff said.
“There was always a little competition to see who could bake the highest angel cake,” she explained in a telephone interview from her restaurant in Mount Joy, Pa.
However, Gert Trani, a research librarian for the Katharine Angell Library at Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., provided a different version of the cake’s origin.
According to Trani, author Norah Smaridge wrote in The Story of Cake (Abingdon Publishers, 1968) that angel food cake was invented in St. Louis by a restaurateur named Sides. About 1890, Mr. Sides (no first name known) developed the cake using a “secret” powder called cream of tartar.
When cream of tartar – a crystalline substance used in making wine and medicines – was added to egg whites it made them rise higher and kept them from reverting to liquid as quickly. According to Smaridge, after Sides’ secret powder became a common ingredient, the recipe for angel food spread around the world.
Had those early cake bakers known they could have achieved the same effect using a copper bowl, perhaps the world could have eaten angel cake earlier and saved generations of unwanted holiday poundage.
Baking tips
If your angel food cake doesn’t turn out perfect, here’s what may have happened: Cake fell: Oven was probably opened before cake had set.
– Cake is lopsided: Cake pan may have touched the oven walls or other pans.
– Cake pan overflowed: Pan selected was too small. Use a larger a pan.
– Cake is dry: Too much flour was used or cake was baked too long.
– Cake is cracked: Too much flour was used or the oven was too hot.
– Cake is sticky: Too much sugar was used.
– Cake is rubbery: Not enough sugar was used.
– Cake has holes: Batter was undermixed.
– Cake is flat: Batter was overmixed.
