I loved Angel Food cake almost from birth. I had it on my first birthday (or so I am told) and for every one of my birthdays after that. It is also my mother’s favourite and she remembers her mother making it when growing up in the 1930s, beating the egg whites by hand.

I have made it for every significant event in my life, most recently to celebrate my own daughter’s wedding, and for plenty of insignificant ones, too. I am certain that, in decades to come, my daughters will be making it, too.

You may not have heard of it because, like me originally, it is American. It is an old-fashioned foam cake, its key ingredient being whipped egg whites and, like all food eaten by angels, is light and airy. (Devil’s Food Cake, moist and chocolatey, is another American invention but not so good, as you’d expect).

I love many things about Angel Food Cake. I love the way it links my life in Kent to my mother’s in Oregon and, before her death, to my grandmother’s in Iowa.

I love that it is so simple, its ingredients unchanged through the centuries, but also takes skill to make, for the egg whites must be beat just so and the flour and sugar folded in carefully. I love the fact it’s made in a tube pan (related but not the same as a Bundt pan). I’ve never seen a tube pan here and, last year, when returning from seeing my family in the States, my luggage included a new one. (I can only imagine what the security sweep made of that.) I even love my Angel Food cake-cutter, a bizarre, multi-pronged bone-handed cutting apparatus that was my mom’s.

Except for my accent, recipes and food are the most American thing about me now. I still buy and use mainly American cookbooks and measurements. For Angel Food cake, my mother uses the recipe in her Better Homes and Garden cookbook which dates from the Fifties and which I now have. I sometimes use a slightly different version from the New York Times cookbook that I bought 30 years ago. I usually dribble some butter icing over it or, in the summer, arrange rows of strawberries on top.

Angel Food Cake

(American measurements*)

1 cup sifted self-raising cake flour

1 and a half cups caster sugar

1 and one fourth cups egg whites (about 10 but depends on the size of the eggs) at room temperature

1 and a fourth teaspoons cream of tartar

one-fourth teaspoon salt

one teaspoon vanilla extract

one-fourth teaspoon almond extract (can be omitted)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sift the flour four times with one half cup of the sugar

Beat egg whites until foamy. Add the cream of tartar and salt and beat until soft moist peaks form when beater(s) removed.

Add the remaining sugar, about two tablespoons at a time, beating in after each addition. Add vanilla and almond extract.

Sift about one-quarter cup of the flour-sugar mixtures at a time over the meringue and cut and fold it in just until no flour shows.

Turn into ungreased (essential) 10-inch tube pan and bake about one hour. Let cake cool in pan.

* dry measurement cups and wet measurement cups differ. An American wet measurement cup is 8 fluid ounces.
The internet has guides to help with both wet and dry measurements.

Times Recommends

• 21 top tips for Christmas
• Chocolate and chestnut souffle cake
• Rabbit and oysters — feasts of Christmas past