Mustard With Mutton

I have a problem with wasting food – I just can’t bring myself to throw anything out. Which is why I always seem to have a lot of small ziplock bags in my freezer filled with egg whites from making ice cream or mayonnaise. I needed to use up some of these egg whites over the weekend but didn’t want to make the usual meringues or pavlova.  I found this Egg White Cake recipe in  Manuela Darling-Gansser’s book Winter in The Alps.  This is a beautiful pictorial cookbook full of delicious winter fare.  This cake is very light and not overly sweet.  It’s perfect with a cup of tea or coffee but as I was having the family over for dinner I wanted to serve it as a dessert and paired it with some strawberries in raspberry sauce.  To serve this cake as dessert it definitely needs the fruit element – poached pears would also be lovely.  If you haven’t got time to make the cake these strawberries are wonderful as a dessert just by themselves topped with  whipped cream.

Ingredients 

Egg white Cake – Adapted from Manuela Darling-Gansser, Winter in the Alps

125g unsalted butter
8 organic or free range egg whites
200g caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
pinch of salt
125g self-rasing flour
100g slivered almonds
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Strawberries in Raspberry Sauce

450g strawberries, hulled and large ones cut in half
250g raspberries (frozen is fine)
1 tablespoon icing sugar

Method

Preheat oven to 180C.  Grease a 25cm springform cake tin.  Melt the butter and leave to cool a little.  Beat the egg whites until they start to hold peaks then, while still beating, slowly add the sugar, reserving about a tablespoon for dusting, until the mixture becomes stiff and shiny.  Add the vanilla and salt to the melted butter.  Fold a little of the butter into the egg whites, then fold in some of the flour.  Continue this until all the butter and flour have been added.  Pour the mixture into the tin.  Combine the almonds, cinnamon and extra sugar.  Sprinkle this evenly over the cake mixture.

               

Bake the cake in the oven for about 40 minutes, or until it springs back a little when touched.  Cool the cake on a rack before serving. To make the strawberries place the raspberries into a fine metal or plastic sieve and push them through to extract all the juice.

Discard the pulp and add the icing sugar to the extracted juice and mix well.  Add the raspberry puree to the strawberries and combine them well so as each strawberry is coated in some of the puree.