[1] Angel food cake with strawberry glaze (photo © American Egg Board.

[1] Berries are a perfect garnish for angel food cake (photo © Anna Ozerova | Dreamstime).

October 10th is National Angel Food Cake Day. Bake one from scratch, or pick up a ready-made cake and serve it with this delicious strawberry glaze.

Angel food cake is a white sponge cake: a light, flourless cake made with sugar, cream of tartar, salt, vanilla or almond extract, and a dozen or so egg whites, depending on the recipe. There is no leavening.

Chocolate angel food cakes were developed much later, adding cocoa powder.

The cake is popularly served with berries and whipped cream, although it can be served plain or with a dessert sauce (caramel, chocolate, custard, fruit, etc.).

Angel food cake originated in the U.S. and first became popular in the late 19th century.

The first angel food cakes were likely baked in the South by African-American slaves, due to the strength required to whip the air into the whites.

The first recipe in a cookbook for a white sponge cake is in Lettice Bryan’s The Kentucky Housewife of 1839.

Angel food cakes are generally made in a tube pan (photo #4). If you’re going to purchase one, get one with a removable bottom.
 
 
RECIPE #1: STRAWBERRY GLAZE FOR ANGEL FOOD CAKE

Ingredient For The Strawberry Glaze

1. STIR orange juice into cornstarch in a medium saucepan. Add strawberries, sugar and marmalade. Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally.

2. REDUCE heat to low; cook 2 minutes, stirring, or until sauce thickens. Cool or chill.

3. CUT cake into 12 slices. Spoon sauce over each slice. Garnish with optional whipped cream.
 
 
RECIPE #2: ANGEL FOOD CAKE

Ingredients

 
Preparation

1. PREHEAT oven to 375°F, with rack in lowest position.

2. MIX powdered sugar and flour in medium bowl; set aside. In a large bowl, beat egg whites and cream of tartar with an electric mixer on medium speed until foamy.

3. BEAT in granulated sugar, 2 tablespoons at a time, on high speed, adding vanilla, almond extract and salt with the last addition of sugar. Continue beating until stiff and glossy. Do not overbeat.

4. SPRINKLE powdered sugar-flour mixture, 1/4 cup at a time, over egg white mixture, folding in with a rubber spatula just until sugar-flour mixture disappears. Use the spatula to cut down vertically through the center of egg whites, across the bottom of the bowl and up the side, turning the egg whites over. Rotate bowl one-fourth turn and repeat. Continue folding this way just until ingredients are blended. Use the spatula to break large air pockets, pushing the batter gently against the side of the pan and the tube.

[4] Angel food cake is bake in a tube pan (recipe and photo © Betty Crocker).

6. BAKE 30 to 35 minutes or until cracks feel dry and top springs back when touched lightly. Immediately turn the pan upside down onto heat-proof funnel or bottle. Let hang about 2 hours or until the cake is completely cool. Loosen side of cake with a knife or long metal spatula; remove from pan.
 
 
> The History Of Angel Food Cake

> The History Of Cake

> The History Of Cake Pans

> The Different Types Of Cake

We love this party favor idea from Popcorn.org. We’d suggest them as trick-or-treat items, but many parents don’t let kids eat the “open” food for safety reasons.

So, bring them to friends, to the office, and anywhere else you like.
 
 
RECIPE: HAUNTED HALLOWEEN POPCORN
HANDS

Ingredients

 
Preparation

1. PLACE 1-3 pieces of candy corn at the end of each finger (depending on size of glove), pointy side first, to make fingernails.

2. FILL the glove with popcorn and tie it off with ribbon or yarn.

Pickled garlic is a healthful, tasty garnish and ingredient. You can buy it in jars, but it’s almost as easy to make your own.

Don’t worry about being overwhelmed by garlic flavor: The cloves lose a lot of their pungency in the pickling process. They are still garlicky, but tame.

Enjoy pickled garlic on salads, sandwiches, skewered appetizers or main courses, as a Martini garnish or as a snack like any pickles. You can also bring jars of it as house gifts—so much more interesting than most bottles of wine.

You can make the pickled garlic more of a condiment by pickling sliced onions and cucumbers along with the garlic cloves.

RECIPE: PICKLED GARLIC

Ingredients

Use pickled garlic to garnish just about anything, including canapés and crostini. Above, turkey and hummus with pickled garlic garnishes.Photo by Elvira Kalviste | THE NIBBLE.

Preparation

1. SEPARATE the heads of garlic into cloves, with the outer skin removed. Set aside. TIP: To soften and loosen the skins, blanch the cloves in rapidly boiling water for 30 seconds, immediately immerse in cold water, drain and peel the cloves.

2. COMBINE the vinegar, sugar, peppercorns, cloves, bay leaf, chiles and lemon zest in a saucepan. Bring to a boil; continue to boil for 2 minutes.

3. ADD the garlic, and continue to boil for 4 more minutes. Remove from heat and let stand overnight at room temperature.

4. TRANSFER to a clean jar. You can strain out the herbs and spices or keep them (we keep them for the aesthetic effect). Cover and store in the refrigerator; the pickled cloves will keep for 6 to 8 weeks. Over the first week, the cloves will become even more pickled.

TIP: When the garlic cloves have been consumed, taste the brine. You may want to incorporate it with oil into a salad dressing.

If you’d like to simply purchase pickled garlic, consider Rabbit’s Pickled Garlic, a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week.

We love these pickled cloves, made in chipotle, habanero, habanero dill, smoke and spicy dill. Read our review.

We all know that carrots are good for us: 1 medium carrot, just 25 calories, provides 203% of our daily value of vitamin A, a powerful antioxidant.* Beyond nibbling on a carrot stick or baby carrot, though, we just don’t take enough time to think about what to do with them.

Here are two easy recipes from Grimmway Farms, a California grower of carrots (and most of the baby carrots you come across).

The carrot hummus recipe is below. Find more carrot recipes at Grimmway.com.
 
 
RECIPE: CURRIED CARROT SOUP

This dairy-free recipe is low in calories: just 91 calories per serving.

Ingredients For 6 Servings

 
Preparation

1. HEAT the olive oil in a sauce pan over medium heat. Add the diced onions, diced carrots, curry powder, cumin, salt and pepper. Toss to combine and cook for about 3 minutes.

2. ADD the chicken broth and cover the pot. Continue to cook over medium heat for another 15 minutes.

3. PURÉE: Carefully remove the cover and purée the soup in batches in a blender. Alternatively, purée the soup in the pot using an immersion blender wand.

[1] Curried carrot soup (photo © Grimmway Farms).

[2] Carrots fresh from the field (photo © Jason Leung | Unsplash).

 
Nutrition Per Serving: 91 calories; 4 g total fat; 0.6 g saturated fat; 2 g monounsaturated fat; 1 g polyunsaturated fat; 0 mg cholesterol and trans fat; 946 mg sodium; 11 g carbohydrate; 3 g fiber; 5 g protein.

Prep time is 5 minutes, cook time is 5 minutes.

Ingredients

1. PLACE all ingredients in a food processor and pulse several times to coarsely chop. Then let food processor run for about 2 minutes until smooth.

2. REMOVE hummus from food processor bowl to serving bowl, using a spatula. Serve with carrot and other vegetable chips, baby carrots and other crudités, or pita chips.

Nutrition Per Serving: 102 calories; 5g total fat; 1 g saturated fat; 0 g trans fat; 2 g monounsaturated fat; 2 g polyunsaturated fat; 0 mg cholesterol; 306 mg sodium; 11 g carbohydrate; 3 g fiber; 4 g protein.
 
 
CARROT TRIVIA

Contrary to popular belief, baby carrots are not grown bite-sized. They are bred long and slender, and then cut into two-inch pieces and lathed to a uniform width.

 
__________________

*Yes, is key to good vision, a healthy immune system, good skin, and general cell growth. It has been studied as a treatment for many other conditions, including cancers, cataracts and HIV. However, the results to date are inconclusive.
  

Serve it as a side dish or as a salad. Is this a potato-squash mix with a garnishing of arugula, or a “salad?” Call it what you will, it makes a beautiful impression. To make it more salad-like, double the amounts of spinach and arugula.

Prep time 10 minutes, cook time 45 minutes.

The tip: Look at other favorite foods and new ways to combine them.

RECIPE: WARM POTATO & ACORN SQUASH
SALAD

Ingredients For 4-6 Servings

What a gorgeous dish! Photo courtesy Heather Scholten | Farmgirl Gourmet.

Preparation

1. PREHEAT the oven to 425°F.

2. ADD 1 teaspoon of the oil to a large baking dish and add the potatoes, squash, rosemary, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes and the remaining oil. Toss lightly to coat.

3. ROAST for 40 to 45 minutes, or until the potatoes are fork tender. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for 5 minutes.

4. COMBINE the roasted vegetables, spinach/arugula mix and feta in a large bowl. Toss lightly to combine. Serve immediately.
 
FINGERLING POTATOES

Fingerlings are small, stubby, finger-shaped potatoes grown from a variety of heritage potato cultivars. Fingerling varieties grow small and narrow naturally. Fully mature when harvested, they are not new potatoes.

Fingerlings are commonly either halved and roasted as a side dish or used in salads.

Popular fingerling varieties include the yellow-skinned Russian Banana Fingerling, the orange-skinned French Fingerling and the Purple Peruvian Fingerling. They are often sold in bags with the three varieties mixed.