Tiny Bubbles

"Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble..." Shakespeare, 'Macbeth'

Many years ago - I was still living at home, in fact - I attempted to make an angel food cake. I remember how tired my arm got from holding the electric egg beater, and I also remember how the end result was more of an angel food discus.

When I began to seriously considered getting a stand mixer, one of the first uses that occurred to me was to have another showdown with my old enemy angel food. I've looked at a few recipes, and when I recently acquired the "America's Test Kitchen Healthy Family Baking Book" I found a recipe I decided I could probably trust. I also acquired a tube pan.

This last Tuesday found me In A Mood. The frustrations of the day suddenly coalesced in a weird recklessness, so I bought a dozen eggs on the way home from work and headed immediately into the kitchen.

The thing with angel food, see, is bubbles. You start by creating your bubbles by whipping air into egg whites that have been fortified with sugar (powdered in a food processor) and cream of tarter. You then provide structure for your bubbles by adding your dry ingredients, carefully folding so as to disturb as few as your bubbles as possible. After baking, you let your cake cool upside down so that your bubbles are not crushed by the weight of the structure you provided for them.

Here is what my bubbles looked like after I removed them from the pan:

And here is a slice of my bubbles:

Thanks to a good recipe, a reasonable level of care and obedience on my part, and perhaps a little luck, my bubbles were fabulous. They were moist, tender yet with a satisfying bit of chew, and were bundled together in a very nice consistency. My very favorite thing, which was true only of that first very fresh piece, was that the browned surfaces were covered with what seemed to be an extremely thin layer of candy, so there was a tiny bit of crunch. That layer was gone by morning, I'm assuming due to having 'melted' in moisture absorbed from the air. It was still wonderful, though, and the people I shared it with loved it.

A few days after making my cake, I happened to see an episode of the America's Test Kitchen program "Cook's Country" in which they demonstrated precisely the recipe I had followed. It was weird but gratifying to watch them step through the procedure I had followed, and it seemed to me that I really had done it pretty much right. They seemed to get more bubbles whipped into their eggs than I did, and thus their finished cake had maybe an inch more rise, but I don't feel even a scintilla of regret - they're the experts, after all, and who knows if they were able to get their fabulous result on the first take?

I have to say that while there was some toil and even a bit of trouble in making my bubbles, I don't have any trouble contemplating making this again. It really was a success.