Search

Join Culinate! Login or Register

Join Culinate

With a free Culinate membership, you can:

Create your own recipe collections
Queue recipes for later use
Blog your culinary endeavors
Be part of our online community of cooks
And much more…

Join Now

Five-Spice Angel Food Cake

From the book Tom Douglas’ Seattle Kitchen by Tom Douglas

Culinate editor’s note: This light, airy cake is a summertime favorite when served with fresh or lightly cooked sugared berries, but you can also serve it plain or with a bit of crème anglaise. The addition of the five-spice powder gives the cake a subtle spiciness and complexity. Try this recipe if you’ve been making a lot of ice cream and have egg whites left over.

Ingredients

	1	cup cake flour
	1	tsp. Chinese five-spice powder (see Note)
	¼	tsp. kosher salt
	10	large egg whites, at room temperature
	1	tsp. cream of tartar
	1	tsp. pure almond extract
	½	tsp. pure vanilla extract
	1¼	cups sugar

Steps

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
In a bowl, sift together the flour, five-spice powder, and salt, then sift the mixture again.
In the bowl of an electric mixer with the whisk attachment, beat the egg whites, cream of tartar, and extracts together at medium speed. Increase the speed to high and continue to beat until soft peaks form. Gradually add the sugar, beating until just before the peaks are stiff. The egg whites should be glossy and smooth. Be careful not to overbeat; overbeaten whites will not expand well in the oven and the cake will not be as tall.
Fold half the flour mixture into the beaten whites with a rubber spatula. Then fold in the remaining flour mixture, being careful not to overwork the batter. Pour the batter into an ungreased 10-inch tube pan and place on the middle oven rack.
Bake until a toothpick inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes. Let the cake sit for a few minutes before inverting the pan onto a cake rack or the neck of a wine bottle to let the cake cool in the pan.
When the cake is completely cool (about two hours after baking), turn the cake pan back over and gently run a knife around the edges to loosen the cake. Turn the cake out onto a serving plate.

Notes

You can buy five-spice powder at most grocery stores, but you can also mix your own from freshly ground spices (use a propeller grinder for the fastest grinding). All you need are equal parts ground cinnamon, ground cloves, ground fennel seeds (toasted first), ground star anise, and ground Szechuan peppercorns (toasted first). Store in an airtight jar.

This cake keeps, well wrapped in plastic wrap, at room temperature for up to 2 days.

This content is from the book Tom Douglas’ Seattle Kitchen by Tom Douglas.

Cook This Now

Upside-Down Polenta Plum Cake

China Moon Cookbook

Crystallized Ginger
Butter Squares

Robert Reynolds

Robert’s Strawberry Shortcake

Culinate Kitchen

Catherine’s Carrot Cake with Cream-Cheese Frosting

Think before you type

Culinate welcomes comments that are on-topic, clean, and courteous. For the benefit of the community we reserve the right to delete comments that contain advertising, personal attacks, profanity, or which are thinly disguised attempts to promote another website.

Please enter your comment

Comment

I recommend this recipe

Format: Bare URLs are automatically linked; use this style: [http://www.example.com "place text to be linked here"] for prettier links. You may specify *bold* or _italic_ text. No HTML please.