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Recipes

Amanda's Chocolate Marbled Angel Food Cake

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Served with Cavedweller.

Ingredients: 
2 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder 
3 tbsp boiling water 
3 tsp vanilla 
14 egg whites -- about 1 3/4 cups 
1 tsp cream of tartar 
1 3/4 cups sugar 
1/2 tsp salt 
1 1/4 cups flour

Directions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a small bowl, combine the cocoa, water, and 1 tsp vanilla until blended. Set aside to cool. Beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Gently beat in the sugar, salt, and vanilla until the peaks retain their shape when the whisk is removed. Gradually fold in the flour until well blended.

Remove 2 cups of batter and combine it with the cocoa mixture. Pour half of the light batter into an ungreased 10-inch tube pan with removable bottom. Pour the chocolate batter over the light. Finally, top with the remaining light batter. Gently swirl the mixture with a knife to help remove any air bubbles and to create a marble pattern. Bake in the middle of the oven for 40 to 45 minutes until the cake is springy and starts to pull away from the sides of the pan. The cake will rise, crack on the top, and then fall slightly; this is normal.

Remove from the oven and invert the pan over the neck of a bottle until the cake is completely cool, about 1 hour. Gently loosen the sides and remove the cake from the pan.

Amanda's Notes: The recipe implies you'll be using a whisk, but my arm would have fallen off before I got the egg whites to stiffen if I hadn't used an electric beater. It takes a very long time for this to happen (on the order of 10 minutes?) so be patient.

The bottle is needed for cooling the cake if the cake is taller than the sides of the pan. If it isn't, you can just invert the pan on a cooking rack. I used a bundt cake pan, and this also worked, but I didn't do a full recipe and then greased the pan to ensure that the cake would come free. You really shouldn't grease the pan if you're doing a full recipe because the cake will fall out as it cools and break against the bottle holding your pan.

A half batch of this can be made using the 8 egg whites left over from a double batch of Coffee Mousse; you can use all 8 egg whites rather than having to use exactly 7.

Last updated: November 21, 2000.