2011.02.24 - Beef Bourguignon, Angel Food Cake with Meyer Lemon Curd

Beef bourguignon isn't the prettiest thing to photograph, so just a picture of cake in this post :)  J recently gave me her great aunt's angel food cake pan, so it was the perfect opportunity to try out a gluten free angel food cake.

Beef Bourguignon

I was not a huge fan of this dish.  The flavor was a little too aggressive for me, either from the wine I chose or the cloves used in the recipe.  The texture was good, but I found the dish to be heavy.  I suppose that is the point with a classic like beef bourguignon, though!  I served this with gluten free corn noodles, although I think I would have preferred crusty bread (when do I not?).

Secret: I primarily made this dish just because I knew I could get the pre-peeled frozen pearl onions at Trader Joe's :)

Modifications: I made a fair amount of ingredient changes.  I substituted pancetta for the salt pork because of availability and made the beurre manie with cornstarch instead of flour to make it gluten free.  I omitted the mushrooms and brandy.  I used a pinch of ground cloves instead of whole cloves and used some freeze dried shallots + onion instead of all fresh shallot.  I added some stalks of celery and doubled the amount of carrots. 

Gluten Free Angel Food Cake with meyer lemon curd

This was my first time making angel food cake.  No one could believe it involved twelve egg whites.  My KitchenAid could barely hold them all!  I thought the cake came out very well -- good texture and taste.  The meyer lemon curd was deliciously addictive and a great pairing with the cake.  

Next time, I will make sure to run the knife in the cake batter even more so since I still had a few air bubbles in the finished cake.  I couldn't believe that cooling the cake over a wine bottle actually worked.  The cake didn't fall out at all!  The biggest mishap is that the wine bottle got stuck in the pan's tube, so I had to cut the cake around the tube to unmold it :)

Modifications: I didn't have white rice flour, so I used twice the amount of sweet rice flour.  I didn't have millet flour, so I used the same amount of sorghum flour.  I am not sure I like the taste of sorghum, so I would try a different flour next time.  I doubled the amount of lemon curd and omitted the zest (because I forgot to zest before juicing, oops!).