Thank Goodness For Angel Food Cake

There's been a change in The Spiced Life kitchen, one that will affect this blog, for how long I am not sure. Consequent to some horrendous abdomen pain, I discovered last week that I have a polyp on my gall bladder. I am not really sure why this is a problem, but it is and it appears that the typical solution is to remove the gall bladder. I say appears because I have not met with the doctor yet. But in the meantime, his secretary emphasized to me that the only way to control the pain is to eat as little fat as possible.


This is much harder than it sounds. A low fat let's lose weight diet is very different from considering every little gram of fat for how much pain it might cause me. Take for example the previously innocent soybean, steamed and salted in their pods to perfection in Japanese restaurants (edamame). Turns out those suckers have a ton of fat, albeit healthy fat. I can attest to this based on the agony I was in last night at 2 AM after eating just 9 pods.


So for the foreseeable (but hopefully not too long) future, recipes on this blog will be as low in fat as possible. I literally made this cake at night, during a fit of despondent, self-pitying chocolate craving (I realize this has no chocolate, but it was dessert, and I did make the chocolate version a few days later for my in laws). Just remembering the existance of angel food cake (and subsequent research into other egg white and cocoa powder based desserts) was a huge relief for this chocolate and dessert addict.

Your angel food cake will rise quite high while baking, but it will collapse, even while upside down, while cooling, to about the height of the pan.

This was my first attempt at a traditional angel food cake, and I was quite pleased with how it came out. Like all vanilla angel food cakes, it is definitely on the sweet side--Alex and I were discussing glazing it with a tart lemon glaze next time. It blew the socks off of a storebought angel food cake, especially because of the lemon zest in the recipe. I made this cake exactly as called for, except for 1 additional teaspoon of lemon zest (for a total of 1 tablespoon), so because my stomach hurts I am just going to link you the recipe.

The best method for cooling an angel food cake is to place it upside down on a wine bottle, even if your pan has feet (mine does). The height of the wine bottle provides much better air circulation, helping the cake to not collapse too much.