I hope I'm not the only one, but I didn't know that Angel Cake Slices were a thing, let alone that they have 3 separate flavours or that they are meant to be made from genoise cake, but hey, you learn something new everyday!
I've made genoise a couple of times, so far so good, but I haven't tried Italian meringue before and don't have the right type of icing sugar, so the final flourish was also a bit of an unknown.
One thing that I need to go thorough is the sheer amount of bowls that are necessary for this recipe. You need so many bowls! I counted up at the end of the recipe and I used a LOT of bowls: • So, there's the one you heat the egg and sugar in • The stand mixer • The 3 separate bowls for the butter and flavourings • A separate bowl to weight out the flour • A bowl for the buttercream • 2 bowls for the fondant • Last but not least, not forgetting a small bowl for the unused egg yolk! So that's at least 10 bowls. What a heap of washing up!
I was quite pleased to find out that Bake Off has gone back to a true Bake Off classic - foil backed baking paper. I am a real fan of this stuff, particularly if you need to reinforce a cake tin, or make an unusual shape. In this instance it is used to make a rectangular tin into 3 compartments, each for one separate flavour of sponge.
I was quite please with how well the divisions in the tin held up, as when the first flavour filling was added I was a little worried that the cake mix would simply flap the paper down and flood the pan, but luckily the foil did its job and the paper held.
Splitting the mix was not a problem (beyond the excessive use of bowls) and the main difficulty was getting the amount of colouring in the lemon and raspberry sponges right. Hopefully these mixes were about right, not too luminous, but visible enough to tell which sponge is which.
The recipe for the buttercream makes a beautifully smooth and not too sweet filling. To be honest I can't really tell the difference between the flavour of Swiss and Italian buttercream, but the Italian method seems quicker than the Swiss one, so that's fine by me. As you might expect, the buttercream involves making a meringue by wishing egg whites and slowly incorporating a sugar syrup, effectively cooking the egg as you go. Once all of the syrup has been whisked in the butter is added piece by piece until you are left with a silky smooth and very light frosting. I love meringue buttercreams as they are super smooth and avoid the sickly sweetness of a standard American buttercream. Although they take longer, the meringue methods also avoid any graininess or grittiness as the sugar is dissolves either in the egg, or as a syrup. It is also lovely to work with and I found that it held its shape and didn't stick to the cakes too much, meaning that it didn't pick up too many crumbs when spread.
For the final icing for the top of the cake I used standard icing sugar combined with a little liquid glucose (as I'd ready that glucose is essentially what makes regular icing sugar into fondant icing sugar). This seemed to work well (although I have no idea whether using normal water icing would have given a substantially different result). The colour on the feathering was a bit too dark for my liking, but for such a small amount of icing it was difficult to mix in only a small amount of colouring. In any event, the result wasn't too bad.
I ended up cutting the cake into more than 6 slices, not only because I wanted to eat some before taking the rest to work (yes, I am greedy!) but the cakes rose so much that cutting the cake into 6 seemed like it would give absolutely HUGE portions! In the end I cut the cake into 8 pieces, 2 of which were eaten that evening, and the remaining 6 pieces were cut in half to make 12 cake fingers to share at work.
The cake was ultimately too sweet for my taste, but if it is meant for something like a children's party, then you can't ask for more than a sweet, pretty slice of light angel cake.
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