After a few hours of home plumbing renovations to our bathroom, which included replacing shower handles, entire valve body, faucet, etc., what’s next on the list of things to do? Bake a cake.
Lately, I’ve been consistent of producing excellent grilled/smoked meats, so I figured on starting a series of articles on baking and cooking that I know I need a little work on. I decided to start out easy. If you’re a guy like me that loves to grill and uses “eh, that’s good enough” as a legit form of measurement, a box of Angel Food Cake Mix is a good place to start.
First, you pour the water – my mix called for 1 1/3 cup (you better measure this one, it’s kinda important) into a non-plastic bowl. Not sure why it can’t be plastic. Maybe it’s like in plumbing where they say you shouldn’t go from plastic to metal back to plastic … not sure. Anyway, bring out the power tool! I used a GE model 10665IN 120v-60hz-225w mixer. If you don’t have one of these, you can always use a power drill, I’m sure one of the spinners on the end would fit in the chuck.
Mix the packet of egg mix with the water. After about 5 minutes, mix in the other packet. Total mixing time is about 7-8 minutes. At this point, the directions mention a “tube pan”, I didn’t know what that was, so I was glad there was a little drawing on the back of the box of what one looked like. Thankfully, we had one, but note to self: I should have looked to make sure before hand. Pour the liquid into the tube pan. The instructions also said to “cut” the bubbles, I hacked at it pretty good but I don’t know for sure if it was doing anything.
I baked it at 375F for 35 minutes, just enough time to watch an episode of Storage Wars (yuuuuuuup!). It looked golden brown to me, so I figured that was good enough. Makes me wonder though what would happen if I had used a meat thermometer. Would I have been able to tell it was done by having it reach a certain temperature? After the cool down process, I turned it over and slammed it down on the table, that didn’t seem to get it to fall out, so I pulled it out of the pan by sliding a spatula down the sides.
It tasted good enough to me, but I don’t really have too much cake-tasting experience. Would I take it over a juicy steak? Nah, I’ll take the steak, but in the end it was fun and I’d do it again … but I probably should think ahead and get some sort of topping.
– Kyle