What Is an Angel Cake?

It depends which side of the Atlantic the person asking grew up on, and the two answers are not variations of each other. In America an angel food cake is a tall white ring, made from whipped egg whites, sugar and flour with no butter, no oil and no yolks at all; it is springy, very light and almost dry, and it is cooled upside down so it does not collapse under its own weight.

In Britain an angel cake, or angel slice, is something else: three thin layers of sponge in pink, white and yellow, sandwiched with buttercream and cut into bars. It is a supermarket teatime cake, it contains butter, and the only thing it shares with the American version is the colour of one of its layers.

Because its entire structure is egg-white foam, and fat destroys foam. Whipped whites hold air in a mesh of protein; a trace of yolk or butter coats those proteins and the mesh collapses, which is why recipes insist on a clean bowl and why a cracked yolk means starting again. With nothing to soften it the cake is raised by air alone, so it sets into something closer to a sweet sponge mattress than to a layer cake.

That also explains the ring tin with the funnel up the middle. A tall fat-free batter has no structure to support itself while it cools, so the tin is inverted the moment it leaves the oven and the cake hangs from its own walls until set. A sponge made with butter needs none of this, which is the real difference between the two traditions.

No, and it is worth saying clearly because the search results mix them freely. The British slice is an ordinary buttered sponge, baked flat and cut, whose selling point is the three bands of colour running through it. Nothing about it is fat-free and nothing about it is difficult; what makes it look special is that each layer is the same recipe with different colouring, baked thin and stacked.

Which means the British angel cake is, in construction, a very small rainbow cake with three colours instead of six. If that is the one you remember, the rainbow cakes page describes how the same idea is built at celebration size, where the bands have room to read as bands.

Not the American one. A fat-free egg-white sponge is a different craft with a different tin, it stales within a day, and it carries neither buttercream nor fondant well — which makes it the opposite of everything this kitchen is set up to send out on an agreed date. Nothing on the menu is built that way and this page would rather say so than improvise.

The coloured-layer idea is straightforward, though, and it is made all the time: it is a rainbow cake, or a cake with as many colours as you want in it. The table below gives the sizes and what each one cuts, so you can see what the three-colour version looks like at a size people actually eat.