Angel Food Cake : No Yolks, Please!

I made angel food cake yesterday! My Most Faithful Readers gave me a tube pan for Christmas, so I wanted to make angel food cake as soon as possible. I'm a big fan of angel food cake. I used the recipe from the Baking Illustrated cookbook. It called for a teaspoon and a half of lemon juice, but I left that out, because I didn't have any lemons yesterday. It's more challenging to acquire such things on Christmas Day. It also called for the egg whites from 12 eggs, which led me to wonder what on earth I would do with the yolks and posed the question to my followers on Twitter. I got a lot of suggestions from them and from friends on Facebook, which resulted in my freezing a bunch of them. One of the suggestions was to make spongecake, which requires 12 yolks, but I didn't really want to make two cakes in one day. Is it really a big deal? Eggs aren't very expensive, but I don't like the idea of wasting them for some reason. They're yellow, after all.

Everything I read in various sources suggested that using a stand mixer makes baking an angel food cake particularly easy and that turned out to be true. Separating all the whites and yolks was probably the most tiresome part of the process. I do think it's pretty nifty how much the cake rises in the oven without any leavening at all. It's like a really dense meringue.

Last night, I made a Brown Sugar Orange sauce, from the Joy of Cooking, to go with the cake. I didn't have any orange juice handy, so I substituted some clementine IZZE. That worked surprisingly well, but the orange flavor probably wasn't as strong as it could have been. Over all, it tasted good, but it was on the thin side for serving with the cake.

Today, once I had some lemons, I made lemon pudding from the recipe in the Luscious Lemon Desserts cookbook, using three of the yolks. It's basically like lemon meringue pie filling in pudding form. It's pretty easy to make, but it requires a lot of stirring while almost paying attention to what you're doing. The recipe specifies that you should strain the pudding while putting it into the serving bowl, but I decided to skip that step. If you use a Microplane Grater/Zester to get your lemon zest, it's pretty fluffy and straining is unnecessary. I discovered this when I made lemon curd a while back when I ended up eating the contents of the strainer.

Don't they look beautiful together? Use your imagination. It just needs a garnish. They certainly tasted good together.