Chocolate-Orange-Coffee Angel Food Cake with Whipped Cream Topping

I tend to cook quite a lot with recipes that require egg yolks. Egg whites by contrast, are not so often requisite for my cuisine. The result can be that over time the number of egg whites builds up steadily, filling up bowls in the refrigerator, dozens upon dozens of them. Throwing them away would be too wasteful, but what does one do when one has so many egg whites, and one's natural inclinations in desserts run to things such as creme brulees, custards, and ice creams? This conundrum has time and time again led me to a simple solution: make an angel food cake. With that, a dozen egg whites are gone at once, used to make this deliciously light, fluffy, and elegant cake that my mother so adores! I must admit that often my results can be imperfect with this, in regards to getting an angel food cake that is light, fluffy, and holds its own - in this case I made a mistake by placing it in the new oven that we had just gotten upon a pizza stone which made the upper part harder than it would have been otherwise - but regardless they always still turn out as having the spirit of the angel food cake.

And what spirit is in this case! I have been quite the aficionado of the trinity of orange, coffee, and chocolate, seemingly a holy trio in my cooking, one which I have combined again and again, most of the time to appropriate success. There is something about the decadent combination of sweetness, richness, the complexity of the flavors, the bitter and tantalizing flavor of chocolate which mixes with the luxurious and deep flavors of chocolate, mellowed out by the fruitiness of the orange, which makes it such an incredible trio. In this case it is combined with the natural lightness of an angel food cake, although it must be noted that the initial incorporation of orange juice into the recipe make it less light than it might otherwise have been, which is corrected here with an updated version of the recipe that doesn't match the photos quite precisely, and with a healthy dosage of whipped cream added on top - a surprisingly simple recipe which takes advantage of whipped cream, confectioners' sugar, and vanilla to produce this pretty mass of elegant whipped cream which covers the entirety of the torus-shaped (in my case) cake. This makes a canvas which can be put to any use: in my case, I think that it would have been best to have some sort of cocoa powder, chocolate chips, and in addition perhaps something like orange peel, Unfortunately I did not so instead I chose to provide a decoration of chocolate chips and in addition some fresh mint leaves. The mint leaves seemed to go with it surprisingly well, so perhaps I have a fourth combination to add to the holy trinity of the orange-coffee-chocolate! In any case it makes for a delightful recipe, sweet, light, fluffy, elegant, and beautiful, one which is sure to delight any cake lover.

This recipe is entirely my own.