I've had this pan for ages - found it at a now-closed church-basement thrift store in Montreal a few years ago.  I had never seen a glass tube-cake pan before, so I figured it was worth saving.  

It is marked as a Glasbake 352, but I never did find out much about it.  I can only guess that it might have been part of the aluminum-for-pyrex movements during the Second World War years.  I've seen eBay listings but the date claims vary from the 1930s through the 1950s.  No one seemed to have one listed with a starting bid of $1000, though... LOL 

But now all the Christmas goodies have been used up, it was time to start baking again and I thought why not try this pan out. 

I used the small Angel Cake recipe from the Dormeyer Electric-Mix Treasures cookbook.  I was surprised at how much batter it made or my estimate that this pan is a 9-inch was way off... 

And baked with Flair, bien sûr!   The cookbook said bake at 350; I reduced the temp 25 degrees, which what I always read to do when using glass pans.  

Inverting the pan for cooling was a challenge... But the end result was outstanding!  I swear it is the moistest Angel Cake I ever made. 

And I had a good and dirty glass pan to test the new detergent dispenser on the Maytag dishwasher with...  

Ken, I think that the 'foam' cakes (Angel, Sponge, and Chiffon) are inverted to keep them from collapsing.

As requested, here's the recipe I used:

1 1/4 cups sugar, sifted twice

1 cup sifted cake flour

about 10 egg whites

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

Measure out 1/2 cup of sugar and sift it with the cake flour three times.

Beat the egg whites until foamy, then sprinkle the cream of tartar over them.  Continue beating until the whites are stiff but not dry.   Gradually whip in the remaining 3/4 cup of sugar.  Quickly blend in the vanilla and almond extracts.

Carefully fold in the flour mixture, about 1/4 cup at a time, using a cake whip or whisk.

Flow batter into a 9 inch tube pan and bake at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes. 

Paul, was it easy to get out of the pan?  How did you prepare the pan?  Crisco and Flour, PAM, Baking spray with flour in it?  I'd love to make one of these but I have this fear I'll never get it out of the pan in one piece. 

It really does look good.

Ralph,  believe it or not, the pan for an Angel Cake is ungreased.  Getting them out is a bit tricky but I have used a thin-bladed metal spatula for loosening the outer rim of the cake, then a regular table knife for the 'tube' part.  When the sides have been loosened, I just keep prying from the outside with the thin spatula and the cake comes out intact. 

Hmmm.... I think I'm going to have to make a video of this technique at some point!

For such a delicate dessert, it’s surprising that the trick to perfect lightness is cooling the cake upside down. If it’s cooled right-side up, the cake collapses on itself and you’ll be left with a flat, donut-shaped disaster, which would go against everything you’ve done up to this point to yield an airy and delicate cake.

• To avoid this catastrophe, cool the cooked cake upside-down until room temperature, about three hours.


• If you don’t have a pan with feet, let it cool upside down with the center column of the pan resting on an inverted mug.

The end result will be the light cake that you’ve been dreaming of. And don’t worry—the cake won’t be harmed when it’s upside down. The sides will stick to the pan and everything will remain fluffy and in-place.

I likely would have tried to grease the pan.  I have an aluminum tube pan with the hollow tube.  I may have to give this a try.

Thank you for the detailed instructions.  I really wouldn't have known to do all this.  I love fussy, involved recipes that use lots of utensils, the mixer, etc.

That looks wonderful!  You've got me in the mood to make angel food cake now!  In the past, I have bought chemically bleached "cake flour" in the USA and brought it home with me.  This kind of flour has been illegal in Europe for a long time if it is bleached with chlorine, peroxide etc.  However it's supposed to produce a finer-textured angel food cake.

This is a photo of what I use.  Notice it has cute little legs to invert the cake for cooling.

I've never seen a glass tube pan.  One seller on ebay calls it a jello mold/cake pan but it looks ideal size for a coffee cake or small pound cake. 

I have a round aluminum tube pan for only angel food and a square aluminum tube pan used for everything else.  We used to go to my grandfathers family reunion every Labor Day and my very favorite thing was Aunt Lena's angel food cake.  She used fresh eggs still warm from the hen's nest, mixed it all by hand.  That cake melted in your mouth like cotton candy.  

I use the recipe from the Maytag Dutch Oven cookbook, about the closest I've come to Lena's.  I buy farm fresh eggs from a friend every week or so, they make the best cake.

Darn you good cooks - now I'm hungry again.

Unfortunately the truth about American-made flours is discouraging. Between the world wars, mills around the country started developing ways to speed up production of flour because of shortages. One of the things they did was to add potassium bromide to the wheat to speed up the curing process and to improve "panification" specs for poorer-quality wheat berries. The idea was to make more bread from more wheat. Swans Down and Softasilk  were specialty cake flour brands that used to be made from a variety of "Soft" wheat grown in the Pacific Northwest off of volcanic soils.

Of course, as usual, once the wars were over and the big milling companies had these new technology-enhanced methods for extracting more product from the resource, they kept going. Nobody complained about the quality of the flours mostly because, during the late forties and fifties, people didn't bake at home as much as they did before the wars. Think Wonder Bread and Cake Mixes.

Bleaching is simply pumping flour into a silo with chlorine gas; what they don't want the consumer to know is that this process strips the wheat of practically all(except starch and gluten) of nutrients that Mother Nature put inside it and all of the carotene (the flavor). What we end up with is a powder that has less flavor than saw dust and chemical nutrients injected back into the dust to satisfy the FDA (as in "helps build strong bodies 12 ways"). Most people don't care because to most people wheat doesn't have a big flavor profile unless you're making French and Italian breads that only have 4 ingredients and guess which is the biggest one. Bleaching also improves the tenderness of the final product and that's why it's great for things like Angel Food Cake.

So-called Artisan Bakeries care about this and go to the expense of buying Organic and Natural Flours, such as King Arthur, because they are neither bleached nor bromated. I think this makes a big difference but even I, with all my high-faluttin' artisanl baker Larnin', prefer to use "Cake" flour for things like Angel Food and Chinese Dim Sum. In Europe, flours have a completely different profile from American flours even though most of the wheat used in milling those French, German, Italian and, I don't know about Spain (Franco screwed up their bread production for decades) comes from this continent. It you're interested in this, go to the King Arthur web site and see all the varieties of flour that are available. They used to have a wonderful cake flour labeled "Guinevere", which was bleached but not bromated, but when the original family sold the company it was discontinued. Now their "Cake" flour product is their wonderful "Family" flour cut with some cornstarch (which is, BTW, the way French bakers make their own "Cake" flour. It works, but it's not the same as Swansdown or SaS.

I have a Wear-Ever aluminum loaf-type angel food pan that I use when I make mine.  It makes cutting & serving it so much easier for me because I can never get the wedges a uniform size.

The pan is 16" long, and is sometimes also called a Pullman.  The name "Pullman" was derived from its use in the compact kitchens of the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_...(car_or_coach)">Pullman railway cars. Although the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Co...">Pullman Company is credited with inventing the lidded baking pans used to create the square loaves, square tin pans existed long before the railroad company. European breadmakers began using the pans in the early 18th century to minimize crust. However, the loaves were selected by Pullman for use on his trains. Three Pullman loaves occupied the same space as two standard round-topped loaves, thus maximizing the use of space in the small Pullman kitchen.