Lemon Angel Food Cake - Preparing the Dry Ingredients

Karen Stiegler: Hi! I am Karen Stiegler, and today I am talking to you about Healthy Baking and showing you how to make a fat free Lemon Angel Food Cake. So next, we are going to talk about preparing and combining the dry ingredients. So I have here cake flour, and this is what we are going to use for this recipe, it's a lighter finer textured flour that's used for cakes to just make the crumb nicer, and it's specially good with Angel Food Cakes.

So we are using that today. If you don't have this in your cupboard and you don't want to run to the store and buy it, you can substitute three quarter cup of all purpose flour and then sift in two tablespoons of cornstarch. But you will find this in the grocery store in the box, different brands, so look for it when you go to the grocery store.

I want to talk to you about measuring your flour, so when you get your flour whether it's in the box, or it's in the bag, you want to aerate it so you want to dump it out, maybe you have a flour container that you keep flour in. But I have dumped some flour into this bowl, and then instead of scooping it we want to spoon it in. The reason we don't want to scoop it is because the flour gets compacted and it's actually more flour. So you need to measure it properly.

So I like to just spoon it in, and then use a knife or a cake spatula or something like this plastic scraper and just level it off, and then you have the perfect measurement for your flour. Also for sugar, I want to talk about sugar for a minute. Some recipes for Angel Food Cake, they talk about using super fine sugar, and you can certainly use that. I can't find it easily in my grocery stores, so I tend not to use it. But if you want to have super fine sugar, and you can put it in regular granulated sugar in your food processor, and pulverize it until it's extra fine, and use it that way. So for this particular recipe, it's fine for us to use the regular granulated sugar. Okay, so we have our cake flour here, and the first thing we want to do is we want to just sift this flour own its own one time. Now let me talk a little bit about sifters. This is an old fashioned sort of hand crank sifter that I have, and you might have something like this or not. Some of the sifters have a hand motion like this, so you want to just sift your flour. And the point of this is all to just keep the cake light and aerated. So we are going to completely sift it. I like to use a spoon at the end, it's quicker. Okay, and you can also use a sieve or a strainer and use a spoon to push it through the sieve. So you don't have to have this exact kind of sifter.

So I have my sifted cake flour. Now what I want to do is -- I am using my kitchen paper for this, you can also use two bowls, the paper can be wax paper or parchment paper, whatever you have around, it's not that picky about what it is. So I am going to put it on my other piece of paper here and I have my sugar, and I am going to take a half-a-cup of my sugar and I am going to sift this with my cake flour. Once again, just to keep everything light and it does grind up the sugar just a tiny bit.

So the thing that's nice to use this paper for is pouring it in like this, you can even do it yourself, you don't need any help. And then I am just going to sift this, and for the sugar I have one-and-a-half of cup sugar in this recipe, but actually if you like the cake sweeter you can go up to two cups. So I suggest first time you stick to the recipe, use a cup and a half, but the next time you make it you could use a cup and three quarters or up to two cups, if you like a sweeter cake.

So I have sifted it once, now I am going to repeat this process three more times, so I have a total of four times sifting the sugar with the flour. Okay, so now we have sifted the half a cup of sugar with the cake flour four times with the sifter, we have it ready to go. And this is going to just help aerate the cake and lighten the cake, and we are going to set this aside, okay. You can do that in advance as well.

So now that we have our dry ingredients ready and combined. Next, we are going to talk about choosing your eggs, separating your eggs, and whipping your egg whites.