Amazingly Airy 5-Ingredient Keto Angel Food Cake (Dairy-Free)

Believe it or not, you can enjoy a wonderfully fluffy and airy angel food cake on a low-carb and keto diet! And the best thing about the recipe for this light-and-dreamy cake is that — you guessed it— you need only 5 ingredients to prepare it!

Tips for making the Amazingly Airy Angel Food Cake

As with any angel food cake recipe, this one calls for lots of eggs. They are the bulk ingredient in this voluminous keto cake, so they’re also the most important. You’ll get the best result when your eggs are at room temperature, so if you store your eggs in the fridge, make sure to take them out at least a few hours before baking.

The next tip for success is (naturally!), beat everything until it’s as fluffy and airy as possible. You really want to incorporate all the air you can into the eggs—and that goes for both the egg whites and the egg yolk mixture.

If you’re feeling ambitious, feel free to sift the dry ingredient mixture three times — just like you do when you make regular angel food cake. Personally, I tend to be lazy and I skip this step because I’ve never noticed any real difference whether I sift the dry ingredients or not. But if you’re aiming for a really fluffy cake, it’s better to be safe than sorry, so you might want to just go ahead and sift the dry ingredients three times. (Or you can simply do it because it’s a tradition!)

Other than that, this is a surprisingly simple cake to make. So, let’s take a closer look at how to prepare it:

First, combine the dry ingredients: that is, the coconut flour…

…and the baking powder.

Mix well. (And sift three times, if you like.)

Next, separate 8 eggs.

Place the whites into a large bowl.

Beat until stiff peaks form.

Like this.

Next, you’ll need the 8 egg yolks and the remaining 2 whole eggs. Place them into a clean bowl.

Add the sweetener.

Now, beat this egg yolk and sweetener mixture…

…until very fluffy, voluminous, and pale. As thick as you can get.

Add the vanilla extract.

Beat again until well combined.

Now, take the dry ingredient mixture and start adding it little by little to the egg yolk mixture while gently stirring with a rubber spatula. Don’t add the dry ingredient mixture too fast: otherwise you’ll lose some of that lovely volume.

When you have added all the dry ingredient mixture, work fast (before the coconut flour starts thickening the batter) and combine the egg yolk mixture with the egg whites.

Mix with a rubber spatula…

…until smooth.

Pour into a very well-greased angel food pan or your preferred cake pan (with capacity of 10 cups = 2.4 L). I have a gorgeous heart-shaped pan from Nordic Ware here (no, they’re not sponsoring this post! Actually, I wouldn’t mind if they did, their stuff is so great…!)

Bake in the preheated oven for 45 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted into the thickest part of the cake.

Remove the cake from the oven…

…and from the pan.

Let cool completely. Frost with your favorite keto frosting (this lemon glaze is wonderful, as is this vanilla frosting!) and enjoy.

Yum!

 

My keto angel food experiments

You might not know that a few years ago I published a monthly newsletter related to the keto diet and weight loss. Each newsletter contained helpful articles with tips, as well as 12 recipes related to different themes. One newsletter was all about the most delicious keto baked goods, and it included a keto version of angel food cake that I had developed.

I remember it took me lots of trial and error to get the keto angel food cake fluffy but not too dry. If I added fluid, it collapsed and turned out too moist. If I used only egg whites, the cake was like meringue — so dry that it crumbled when you so much as looked at it.

However, soon I found out that the key was to use egg whites as well as egg yolks and whole eggs. After that, finding the correct ratio—plus adding some coconut flour to make it all hold together—wasn’t that hard.

I didn’t want to use almond flour (even though it’s great: here’s one popular 5-ingredient keto cake recipe using almond flour), because you usually need a lot of it and the texture will be more coarse than when using coconut flour, which is much finer. This angel food cake naturally had to have a smooth texture.

Well, I remember I tried also whey protein instead of coconut flour, but it made the cake too dense, plus whey protein is a dairy product and I wanted to make this cake dairy-free.

In the newsletter recipe, I used cream of tartar as well as baking powder to help the cake rise. (I think I used the cream of tartar just because almost all regular angel food cake recipes call for it.)

Fast forward to this spring. I wanted to start experimenting with the keto angel food cake recipe that appeared in my newsletter because I needed a cake base for my son’s birthday cake (he turned 8 at the end of February).

I ended up making three (!) birthday cakes for my son: one for the family, one for the science club he was attending, and one for the visit to Grandma and Grandpa (i.e., my parents). I took the newsletter recipe and wondered what would happen if I omitted the cream of tartar and just used baking powder as a leavening agent, but slightly more than the 2 teaspoons that the original recipe called for.

So, I conducted an experiment that was otherwise identical to the newsletter recipe, except I omitted the cream of tartar and used 1 tablespoon baking powder. The result was superb, and I was really happy the cake turned out so fluffy and airy, even minus the cream of tartar. Now I had a great 5-ingredient cake recipe which I could post here on my 5-ingredient blog!

I made one further change, though: Instead of erythritol crystals, I tried powdered erythritol. In one of my experiments (in which I used a cake pan with lots of nooks and crannies), the erythritol somehow sank to the bottom of the cake pan (right into those nooks and crannies), forming a gel-like layer with some bubbles in it.

Yuck.

I remembered my first experiments with erythritol some 15 years ago, when I ended up with a similar gel-like layer on top of a cake. Using powdered erythritol solved the problem then. (Also, using less erythritol crystals and adding some stevia was another solution.) But now, I wanted to see how pure powdered erythritol would work.

It worked extremely well! No gel-like layer, but a smooth and even surface, even when I used a cake pan with small details. But for a flat-bottomed cake pan, erythritol crystals work almost equally well.

I finally got everything right! Now it’s about time to post the recipe so that you and your family can enjoy it, too!

So, here it is: