Lab experience

One of my favorite cooking experiences was when my group made angel food cake. It doesn’t take a long time to make and it doesn’t have a lot of steps either. I really liked how flavourful, light and fluffy the cake could be using only a few ingredients. Even though this cake took very few steps, it was difficult because it is very time sensitive.

            For the mis en place we had to separate the egg whites from the egg yolks because we only needed egg whites for the recipe. Unfortunately we needed 11 egg whites for the recipe and my group ruined an egg. So we were an egg short and didn`t think our cake would rise as much, but there was nothing we could to about it. We measured all the other ingredients and wrapped all the containers up with plastic wrap. We put them in the refrigerator to keep them fresh.

            The next day, our group got the measured ingredients out and the stand-up mixer.  We had to whip the egg whites up as high as possible, and since we were one egg short we needed to make sure we whipped it very well. We had to slowly add the other ingredients like sugar and vanilla extract, leaving flour of to the side. The next part was the hardest. We needed to take the fluffy egg whites and put them into a bowl where we then mixed in flour. We had to be very careful because we did not want to deflate the fluffiness of the eggs. We needed to fold over the mix instead of stirring it and fold it fast so we could get it into the pan and put it in the oven.

            When the time was up, as indicated by Chef, we took out the cake keeping it upside-down while it cooled so it didn`t deflate. When we took it out of the pan, we compared our cake with Chef`s and even with one less egg we managed to have the same size of cake as he did.