coffee chiffon cake

I've been wanting to try making a chiffon cake for a while now, so when we found out it was our our friend K's birthday last week, I thought it would be the perfect time to try making one.  I decided to try this recipe for coffee chiffon cake.

It took me three tries to get a decent chiffon cake.  The recipe called for an angel food cake tube pan, but I wanted to make a layer cake with two 8" pans instead.  I knew that I'd have to change the baking time, but I just didn't know by how much.  I ended up underestimating the baking time for my first batch - I had never made chiffon cake before and didn't know what to look for to tell if it was done.  But the toothpick came out clean so I assumed it was done!  I was wrong.  A few minutes after being taken out of the oven, my cakes started deflating ... and pulling away from the sides of the pan ... and eventually collapsed into a sad, lumpy mess.

So I made a second batch.  This time I almost doubled the baking time, still not knowing how to tell if it was done or not.  But when I pulled it out of the oven, it was already collapsed!  What was I doing wrong?

After a couple of searches on the internet (thanks Google!) I discovered that I was preparing the pans wrong.  Angel food and chiffon cakes rely on the whipped egg whites for their height, and if you grease the pans (which I was doing, like I normally do for regular cakes), the cake has nothing to grip onto for stability while rising.  And so it will collapse.  Aha!

So I had to make a third batch.  This time I didn't grease the pans at all, but still kept a piece of parchment paper on the bottom of the pan.  When I took the cakes out of the oven, I set them upside-down to cool (as Google instructed me to do), to help keep the cakes from deflating.  After they had cooled, I turned them right-side-up and was happy to see that they didn't deflate at all!  But ... as soon as I used my offset spatula to release the edges of the cake from the cake pans, they deflated.  But only a little bit.  So I was still happy.

To go with the lightness of the chiffon cake, I filled it and covered it with cream that I whipped up with cocoa powder and sugar.  Then I dusted the top with more cocoa powder, and decorated it with some whole coffee beans.  Hope you enjoyed it K and C!