Anyone else ever used one of these for Angel Cake??

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I've never seen a glass tube pan.  One seller on ebay calls it a jello mold/cake pan but it looks ideal size for a coffee cake or small pound cake. 

 

I have a round aluminum tube pan for only angel food and a square aluminum tube pan used for everything else.  We used to go to my grandfathers family reunion every Labor Day and my very favorite thing was Aunt Lena's angel food cake.  She used fresh eggs still warm from the hen's nest, mixed it all by hand.  That cake melted in your mouth like cotton candy.  

 

I use the recipe from the Maytag Dutch Oven cookbook, about the closest I've come to Lena's.  I buy farm fresh eggs from a friend every week or so, they make the best cake.

 

Darn you good cooks - now I'm hungry again.

 
 
Looks good!  I too have one of those glass pans, but I'd use it for pound cake and such, too small for the cakes I make.  I also have the requisite round tube pan and a square both aluminum, both from the early 50's.  I make chiffon cakes, and rarely an angle food cake.  I do have a few box angel food cake mixes and if I'm hungry for something sweet, it's a quick mix and into my microwave convention oven for a treat.
 
You guys know an impressive amount about this

Unfortunately the truth about American-made flours is discouraging. Between the world wars, mills around the country started developing ways to speed up production of flour because of shortages. One of the things they did was to add potassium bromide to the wheat to speed up the curing process and to improve "panification" specs for poorer-quality wheat berries. The idea was to make more bread from more wheat. Swans Down and Softasilk  were specialty cake flour brands that used to be made from a variety of "Soft" wheat grown in the Pacific Northwest off of volcanic soils.

 

Of course, as usual, once the wars were over and the big milling companies had these new technology-enhanced methods for extracting more product from the resource, they kept going. Nobody complained about the quality of the flours mostly because, during the late forties and fifties, people didn't bake at home as much as they did before the wars. Think Wonder Bread and Cake Mixes.

 

Bleaching is simply pumping flour into a silo with chlorine gas; what they don't want the consumer to know is that this process strips the wheat of practically all(except starch and gluten) of nutrients that Mother Nature put inside it and all of the carotene (the flavor). What we end up with is a powder that has less flavor than saw dust and chemical nutrients injected back into the dust to satisfy the FDA (as in "helps build strong bodies 12 ways"). Most people don't care because to most people wheat doesn't have a big flavor profile unless you're making French and Italian breads that only have 4 ingredients and guess which is the biggest one. Bleaching also improves the tenderness of the final product and that's why it's great for things like Angel Food Cake.

 

So-called Artisan Bakeries care about this and go to the expense of buying Organic and Natural Flours, such as King Arthur, because they are neither bleached nor bromated. I think this makes a big difference but even I, with all my high-faluttin' artisanl baker Larnin', prefer to use "Cake" flour for things like Angel Food and Chinese Dim Sum. In Europe, flours have a completely different profile from American flours even though most of the wheat used in milling those French, German, Italian and, I don't know about Spain (Franco screwed up their bread production for decades) comes from this continent. It you're interested in this, go to the King Arthur web site and see all the varieties of flour that are available. They used to have a wonderful cake flour labeled "Guinevere", which was bleached but not bromated, but when the original family sold the company it was discontinued. Now their "Cake" flour product is their wonderful "Family" flour cut with some cornstarch (which is, BTW, the way French bakers make their own "Cake" flour. It works, but it's not the same as Swansdown or SaS.

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I have a Wear-Ever aluminum loaf-type angel food pan that I use when I make mine.  It makes cutting & serving it so much easier for me because I can never get the wedges a uniform size.

 

The pan is 16" long, and is sometimes also called a Pullman.  [COLOR=#252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14.875px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 19.04px]The name "Pullman" was derived from its use in the compact kitchens of the [/COLOR]Pullman railway cars[COLOR=#252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14.875px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 19.04px]. Although the [/COLOR]Pullman Company [COLOR=#252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14.875px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 19.04px]is credited with inventing the lidded baking pans used to create the square loaves, square tin pans existed long before the railroad company. European breadmakers began using the pans in the early 18th century to minimize crust. However, the loaves were selected by Pullman for use on his trains.[/COLOR][COLOR=#252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14.875px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 19.04px] Three Pullman loaves occupied the same space as two standard round-topped loaves, thus maximizing the use of space in the small Pullman kitchen.[/COLOR]

[this post was last edited: 1/23/2016-10:40]

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RE Flour

If you can make biscuits with anything other than a soft winter wheat flour, more power to you LOL, I use Virginias Best Self Rising, or Adluh Self Rising, I use these old fashioned bleached flours because, one, they are much finer and make a much more delicate biscuit, two they ARE bleached and gray biscuits just are not appetizing, I use Swans Down for layer cakes, All Purpose for Pound cakes.
 

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