I have decided that we need to talk about egg whites. Their chief purpose, in baking, is to lend structure to baked goods. They also add liquid to a recipe, but I’m not going to deal with that right now. Because of the unique properties of egg whites, they alone can be used to leaven things like cakes without the aid of yeast or chemical leaveners.

When recipes call for egg whites, they typically call for them to be beaten. This causes a lot of confusion for people because recipes ask you to beat the whites “until foamy”, “until the batter falls from the beaters in ribbons”, “until glossy” or “until soft/stiff peaks form”.

Here is a mini tutorial, based on making meringue (which involves beating sugar into the whites as you whip them). The texture of the whites will be similar (though perhaps slightly less glossy) when whipping egg whites alone, so the illustrations can be used as a reference in multiple situations.

Start with room temperature egg whites. I don’t use copper bowls. Though it is harder to overbeat your egg whites in one, this is because copper ions migrate into the egg whites. Egg whites beaten in a copper bowl will be slightly yellowish and more stable than ones beaten in other bowls, but I still don’t like the idea that copper ions are now in my cake/food. To give extra stabilization to the egg whites in non copper bowls, you can add cream of tartar when you are beating them, if you wish.

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Tomorrow is the last day to sign up for Blogging By Mail. After tomorrow, I’ll send out addresses and any special requests (e.g. if there are any allergies to contend with). If you want to join, just e-mail me with “Blogging By Mail” in the subject line!

It was pointed out in this article, that when Cooks Illustrated standards diverge from your own, you can end up being a bit disappointed with their recipes. I have found this to be a true assessment on several occasions, though the recipes themselves are excellent. There are some types of food where the likelihood of this happening is very low. Cakes are a good example as I have yet to meet someone who wants a dry, non-tender cake. Flavors can easily be altered, but the foundation of the cake is very important and I have found The Best Recipe to be a great resource.

This angel food cake recipe is a great example of a “best recipe”. It is moist, tender, not overly sweet and ethereally light. I could have eaten the entire thing in one sitting - which was a shock and all the store bought angelfood cakes I’ve had taste like sweet styrofoam and even ones I have made before have not turned out this well, though I do like the individual spiced angel food.

I slightly differed from the recipe by using superfine sugar, also known as castor sugar, instead of granulated because I fine it produces smoother meringues. I also did not use lemon juice/extract in the cake. I used vanilla paste - you can spot the beans in the photo if you look very closely - and almond extract to flavor the cake and served it with orange and lemon curds. Lemon curd is always a nice, tart contrast with angel food cake. The orange curd was made by substituting orange for lemon in the same recipe. It tasted marvelously sweet and smooth, rather like a creamsicle. It paired with this angel food even better than the lemon curd did.

I like to make it the night before and take it out of the pan the next day, so this can be prepared a day in advance. Use a serrated knife to slice it. This cake will be making appearances at my table more than once this summer. I’m already thinking about pairing it with balsamic strawberries.

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In a bout of shamless self promotion, check out my article on Saucy today. The Reluctant Vegan is the name of the series I’m going to be working on. I’d explain the concept here, too, but the article itself is an introduction. The photo above is for the Apple Pistachio Spice cake I give the recipe for. I just love this cake - I think that the cardamom really makes it work.
Let me know what you all think. And suggestions for future topics are welcome.

If you keep a sourdough starter, like I do, you know that you have to throw out a bit every time you feed it - unless you bake a loaf every day. Usually I’ll just bite the bullet and toss the unfed starter, but sometimes I’ll try and do something with it. King Arthur has some great recipes, including one for making Sourdough Crumpets with that leftover starter!

All you do is add a bit of sugar, salt and baking soda to the starter and toss it in a dry frying pan to cook like a pancake. The baking soda neutralises the acidity of the starter and, in the process, creates lots of air bubbles, which are perfect for filling with butter, honey or lemon curd. The crumpets are best fresh and crisp off the grill, so eat them as you make them. If you make more than you can eat in one sitting, just pop the leftover crumpets in the toaster to crisp them up again.

KA’s recipe is great and super easy. Once you’ve made these, you won’t even need a recipe! It calls for the use of a 4 inch crumpet ring (or other circular, hollow tin), but it works just fine if you don’t use one. I don’t have a crumpet ring, so I did mine free-form. They’re a bit thinner this way, but no less tasty.

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Hosted by Viv, this month’s Is My Blog Burning theme is Eggs. It was hard for me to decide on a recipe for this IMBB. Clearly we all know by now that I am partial to sweet things. Most baked goods already involve eggs, so I really could have chosen anything I might ordinarily make and post it for this event. But that didn’t really seem to be in the spirit of things. I wanted to do something that was (a) at least a little unusual and (b) featured eggs heavily.

I was flipping an old Joy of Cooking (1946 edition - and note that they don’t appear in more current additions) when I spotted Hard Cooked Egg Cookies. My first thought was that they were cookies that would have a dollop of curd or something in the center to resemble hard boiled eggs. They actually involve putting hard boiled eggs through a ricer and into the batter.

I cheated and made the whole dough in the food processor, so I didn’t have to rice the eggs in advance. The recipe’s baking instructions were limited to “Cook in a slow oven.” Not that that is vague, or anything. Despite the fact that the recipes called for dipping the unbaked cookies in egg whites and rolling them in sugar, because there was no leavening in the cookies, I decided that perhaps they should be rolled and cut out like shortbread. I dipped a few teaspoon sized balls in the egg white, rolled them in sugar and baked them before rolling out the rest of the dough to compromise. They were ugly, but I think they had a slightly better crunch to the outside than the rolled cookies. The cutout cookies, which are pictureed above, by the way, were brushed with egg white and sprinkled with coarse sugar. I underbaked the cookies slightly, so they didn’t keep well; they were rather mushy the next day. But I got a request for another batch (baked longer this time!), so it definately wasn’t all bad.

There was no way that you could guess that there were hard boiled eggs in these cookies. The cookies had a nice, light lemon flavor - which I would slightly increase next time - and a moist, melt-in-your-mouth texture. Here is the recipe, complete with how I would do it again: increase the lemon, increase the baking time, keep the rolling, but dip the but cookies into the egg white before dredging in sugar.

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