angel food cake

Because I spontaneously bought a bright and happy yellow tube pan from Safeway yesterday, I felt compelled to make an angel food cake today to bring over to our friends’ dinner tonight.  This is actually an easy cake to make (that is, if you have a good electric mixer or else you’ll be really giving your arm a work out whipping up the egg whites) and has zero fat in it so it’s kiiiind of guilt-free.

1 and 1/2 cups egg whites (about 12 large egg whites.  We felt it was a bit wasteful to chuck out 12 perfectly good yolks so we bought a 500 g carton of liquid egg whites and they worked out great)  /  1 and 1/4 cups cake flour  /  1 and 3/4 cups sugar  /  1 tsp cream of tartar  /  1 tsp pure almond extract  (or if you don’t have this/don’t like almond extract, just use vanilla extract instead)  /  small pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 325F.  Using an electric stand mixer, beat (really, more like whip) the egg whites and the cream of tartar until stiff peaks form.  Make sure you don’t over-beat!  Just as the egg whites are about ready, toss in the almond extract and let it mix in.  In a separate large mixing bowl, sift together the sugar, salt and cake flour.  It should all be very well combined and if it’s not feel free to sift it a couple more times.  Gently plop the egg whites into the flour mixture and using a spatula, very carefully fold in until everything is just combined.  Then gently scoop into a tube pan that has NOT been greased and slide into the oven.

Bake for about 30 minutes.  You’ll know that its done when the cake is getting just a little bit golden and when you stick an uncooked spaghetti noodle/toothpick into it, it comes out dry.

After you take it out of the oven, carefully flip the pan upside-down over a baking sheet and let it cool for maybe an hour.  I’m not entirely sure why this is done but I think it’s to make sure that the cake doesn’t start collapsing a bit.  When it’s cooled, run a knife around the outer edge of the cake, flip the pan back over and kinda slap the pan until the cake falls out.  To slice, use a serrated knife, like a bread knife, just so you don’t smush down the cake while cutting it.  Yum!  Well the entire cake was eaten up in minutes so I think it must have been a success.

i <3 memphis blues: pulled pork & barbecue sauce

I haven’t blogged in quite a while ‘cus I’ve felt so damn exhausted and uninspired lately and I blame at least part of it on the miserable eternal winter we’ve been experiencing.  But finally this weekend, it’s not -25C and it’s sunny and happy!  Perhaps now that it’s April, spring might finally wanna show up in Saskatchewan. I have been hating on living here quite a bit these last weeks but maybe if I finally see something green I’ll feel better.  Nonetheless, I am really missing home lately and was going on and on to Rock about all the stuff I would like to eat if I were home.  So I decided to try and make something from my favourite southern barbecue joint in Vancouver, Memphis Blues.  I know that they had published a cookbook a while back so I looked for their recipes for their dry spice rub and barbecue sauce online.  It’s as close as I’m gonna get to actually eating at Memphis Blues for now!

Our barbecue is very unfortunately out of commission so I decided to just cook the pork in the oven.  I’m sure using some nice wood chips and slowly getting some smoke in there over the course of 8 hours would be much better but today, slow roasting will have to do.

I’ve got the recipe for the dry rub and pulled pork followed by the recipe for the barbecue sauce below.  Even though I’ve listed the sauce recipe after, whip it up while the pork is roasting since it’s going to be cooking for a good long while.

pulled pork:   2-3 lb pork shoulder/pork butt  /  dry spice rub

dry spice rub:  1 cup sugar  /  1 cup seasoning salt  /  1 cup dried parsley  /   3 tbsp paprika  /  3 tbsp garlic powder  /  3 tbsp onion powder  /  3 tbsp black pepper  /  3 tbsp dried oregano  /   tbsp mustard powder  /  1 tbsp celery salt  /  a couple shakes of cayenne pepper  (this recipe will make more than you need for one pork shoulder but you can just keep it in an airtight container and use it for other stuff)

Preheat the oven to 300F.  Whisk together all the ingredients for the dry rub and then generously rub it all over the pork shoulder.

Then just slap into a roasting pan with the fattier side of the pork facing up and put it into the oven for 3.5 hours.  Next, wrap up the pork shoulder in aluminum foil and put it back in the oven for about 1.5 to 2 hours.  You’ll know that it’s done if when you push it with your finger it feels really tender.  When it’s all done, just pull it apart with a couple forks and gobble it up with barbecue sauce either by itself or in a sandwich.

For the barbecue sauce:

2 cups water  /  4 tbsp brown sugar  /  8 tbsp tomato paste  /  4 tbsp molasses  /  4 tbsp white vinegar  /  4 tbsp soy sauce  /  4 tbsp honey  /  4 tbsp ketchup  /  4 tsp yellow mustard  /  4 tsp worcestershire sauce  /  4 tsp garlic powder  /  4 tsp onion powder  /  4 tsp seasoning salt  /  a few splashes of tabasco sauce

Whisk everything together in a saucepan and let it simmer over low heat for an hour, giving it a stir every once in a while.  It will have thickened up a bit while it’s cooking and will smell amazing!

Rock says the pork was very well seasoned and was tasting way better when he was eating it with his hands instead of with a fork.  I wasn’t sure how well the pork would turn out from being cooked in an oven instead of a smoker or a barbecue but it actually turned out very good.  And the barbecue sauce tasted just like home.  Now I can have Memphis Blues whenever I want!