Lemon Angel Food Cake Recipe (Backrooms Cake)

This super easy lemon angel food cake recipe, which I'm also counting as a Backrooms cake, tastes heavenly despite its mildly sinister backstory.

Angel food cake is an oil-free cake made of just egg whites, sugar, flour, and an acidic stabiliser to help the whipped egg whites keep their shape.

The stabiliser is usually either cream of tartar or lemon juice. Despite this being a lemon cake, I chose cream of tartar, because it's a dry ingredient and easier to control the consistency of when added to the egg whites. Lemon juice is liquid, so too much of it risks deflating the egg whites: especially if you add lots in the hopes of a more lemony flavour.

You also can't really add lemon extract to flavour the angel food cake batter itself, as lemon extract is almost always made with oils – which could also deflate the whipped egg whites.

Luckily, because cream of tartar is also acidic, it gives the cake a nice tang without the lemon juice. And paired with a lemon curd whipped cream topping, the finished cake is perfectly lemony and zingy.

But why is it sinister? Well, if you've watched Backrooms – the recent A24 film directed by Kane Parsons, you'll probably have taken one look at the texture of this cake and instantly understood.

I've been a casual fan of Kane's YouTube Backrooms series since the very first videos came out, and I really enjoyed this big-screen version / continuation of the story.

Horror movies don't often properly scare me, but there are two genres or themes that usually at least get under my skin: cosmic horror (which, although technically not so, I feel Backrooms is adjacent to), and when humans are the cause of the horror. And the latter is where this cake comes in.

(Backrooms movie spoilers in white text below:)

Towards the end of the movie, the character Clark has his therapist, Mary, tied to a chair and seated at a dining table in the backrooms.

There's also a distorted, humanoid creature called a 'still life' sitting docily with them. Here, Clark demonstrates how these creatures don't feel any pain by slowly sticking a knife right into its neck.

The moment that truly made me go "What the actual f" though, was when he followed this up by unbuttoning this still life's shirt, gleefully declaring,

"The best part? You can eat them!"

He grabs handfuls of fluffy, slightly gooey, white-grey stuffing from its stomach and plops them onto plates in front of himself and a horrified Mary.

My first thought as I was watching it? "This is the most messed-up game of 'Is it cake?' I've ever seen."

The stuffing kind of resembled puffball fungus or memory foam – but also a little like angel food cake. And then it got me craving angel food cake like a weirdo, so I decided to make some.

But while I was eating it, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was eating a still life cake. It was a very delicious still life cake, anyway.

(End of Backrooms movie spoilers.)

Obviously, I made this a yellow lemon cake because of the signature wallpaper in the backrooms. I'm not skilled enough to pipe on the stripes and chevrons from the wallpaper pattern, but you get the general idea.

You can also watch me make this on my YouTube channel, Tashcakes:

Ready? Let's go.

Ingredients for Angel Food Cake:

10 egg whites (or 300g egg whites from a carton)
300g caster sugar
2 tsp cream of tartar
Pinch of salt
125g plain flour

Ingredients for Lemon Cream:

300ml whipping cream
3 heaped tbsp lemon curd
A few drops of yellow food colouring (optional)

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C and move the oven shelf to the lowest position.

2. Whisk the egg whites until they form stiff peaks, and whisk in the sugar, salt and cream of tartar until stiff and glossy.

3. Sift the flour in and carefully fold until just incorporated.

4. Spoon into an ungreased 10" angel food cake pan, run a knife around the middle a couple of times to break up any large air pockets and bake for around 40 minutes, or until a skewer poked into the middle comes out clean.

5. As soon as you take it out of the oven, turn the pan upside down and let the cake rest like this for at least an hour to cool (if your pan doesn't have 'feet', balance the central spout on the neck of a bottle of wine to allow for airflow).

6. Carefully run a palette or butter knife around the edge of the pan and the central spout and pop the cake out, and run it under the base to completely free the cake. Place it on a serving plate and let it cool completely.

7. To make the lemon cream, simply whip the cream until it forms soft peaks, whisk in the lemon curd, and gently fold in the yellow food colouring.

8. Cover the cake with the lemon cream, spreading around evenly. Then slice and serve.

Enjoy, and have fun.