Erin Mann is baking a new cake every week for a year from the "All Cakes Considered" cookbook and shares her adventures here on AnnArbor.com. Read past columns here.

Angel food cake was my favorite dessert growing up. I still enjoy it as an adult, especially with toppings like dark chocolate pudding and lemon curd.

Erin Mann | Contributor

Growing up, I considered angel food cake one of my favorites. My mother had a fun take on the classic angel food cake that involved whipped cream and jello. She would slice the cake in half horizontally and scoop some cake out of the middle of the bottom layer to make a shallow trench all the way around the cake. Then she filled the trench with jello, replaced the top layer, frosted the cake with whipped cream, and decorated the top with candied fruit slices. Oh, how I loved that cake — when you’re a kid it doesn’t get much better than jello and whipped cream.

Tall, delicate, light and airy, angel food cake truly is the “food of angels.” It is a type of sponge cake that relies on beaten egg whites instead of leaveners like baking powder or soda to add volume to the cake. The heat from the oven causes the air cells to expand and the cake to rise. The cake does not contain any butter, which makes virtually fat free.

I prepared my straight-sided tube pan by cutting a parchment circle and placing it in the bottom of the pan. There is no need to grease the sides of the pan when making angel food cake; the cake will cling to the sides of the pan when it rises. An ungreased pan also plays an important role in cooling the cake. Angel food cake needs to be cooled upside down because it can easily sink if cooled right side up — the cake would slide right out of a greased pan.

I was surprised by how quickly the cake comes together. The most time consuming part was separating the 8-10 eggs needed to make 1 cup egg whites. I beat the egg whites and sugar to stiff peaks. I then gently mixed the flavorings (vanilla and almond extracts) into the egg white mixture. I sprinkled the flour on top of the egg whites and folded it into the egg white mixture.

After baking, I removed the cake from the oven and cooled it upside down over the neck of a glass beer bottle as the recipe suggested. When the cake was cool, I ran a knife around the edges of the pan to release the cake.

There are a number of excellent uses for the leftover eggs yolks. Rex and I used the yolks to make a stove-top dark chocolate pudding. Eager to eat our dessert, we spooned the warmed pudding over slices of the angel food cake (it was more like a chocolate sauce at this point, but after a night in the fridge it was a rich, wonderful pudding.) We also tried the cake with some lemon curd I picked up at Trader Joe’s.

Overall, I was very pleased with my first attempt at angel food cake. My only criticism is that the cake could have been “taller,” which was due to poor folding technique.

Incorporating the flour into the egg white mixture without deflating the egg whites is a bit tricky. My folding technique could use a little improvement; I think I overworked the batter and lost some air. I used a spatula to fold in the flour, like I learned months ago from “All Cakes Considered” when I made Swedish visiting cake.

For additional tips on folding, I consulted Sherry Yard’s “The Secrets of Baking.” She says a wire balloon whisk is the optimal tool to use when folding flour into egg whites:

You want to minimize the number of times the foam is disturbed while still incorporating the ingredients thoroughly, covering as much territory in as few strokes as possible. The right tool — the wire balloon whisk — makes this possible. A balloon whisk drawn through foam in one motion cuts about twenty tunnels through the foam, dragging a portion of the ingredients through each tunnel.

Next week, I’ll be baking a variation of the classic angel food cake. The variation will be another opportunity to work on my folding technique using Sherry's suggestion and to explore more toppings. I’m thinking fresh strawberries. Or maybe I should make it the way Mom used to make it? What are your favorite angel food cake toppings?

Erin Mann is ruining diets one cake at a time with her weekly kitchen adventures. Email this baking bachelorette at SheGotTheBeat@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter. Facebook users can also keep up-to-date with A CAKE A WEEK by joining the group.