Munavalgekook (Egg White Cake) Recipe

After churning several batches of ice cream in rapid succession, I ended up with quite a sizable collection of frozen egg whites in my freezer. Because there are only so many egg white omelettes that one can stomach, I started compiling recipes that call for egg whites, like the Italian macaroons or the classic French macarons. David Lebovitz's Homemade Marshmallows was another option, until an inspired session of recipe-hunting led me to Nami-Nami's blog.

The recipe calls for common ingredients that you are likely to have on hand, and yields a pastry with a soft sponge-like texture with rich eggy undertones (despite not containing any egg yolks.) I'm not halfway close to Estonian (heck, I can't even pronounce the name), but every bite of this soft fluffy cake with its lightly-sweetened texture came tinged with a sense of childhood nostalgia. 

Although not part of the traditional Munavalgekook, I thought the cake lends itself quite well to a glazing of chocolate sauce. If you're feeling dramatic, you could even fill a mini-Baileys bottle with chocolate sauce and perch it over the top of a Bundt cake. When ready to serve, lift up the bottle to drizzle the cake with chocolate.

Munavalgekook

While making this recipe, I've decided that a microwave is a home baker's best friend. 
My frozen egg whites defrosted in just under a minute in the microwave on high. The microwave also makes melting chocolate a breeze, with none of the worry of having chocolate seize from droplets of water from a traditional double boiler. 

This recipe can be scaled up or down as necessary. I scaled the proportions down to 2/3 for the four frozen egg whites in my freezer, but left the proportions unchanged here. 
Ingredients
100 g butter (just under a stick), plus more to butter the bundt pan 
160 g plain/all-purpose flour
1 heaped Tbsp potato starch or cornflour
1 tsp baking powder
6 large egg whites
250 g caster sugar

Steps
1) Melt the butter in either a saucepan set over a small flame, or in the microwave in 10s interval, stirring after each interval. Set aside and let cool. Butter the bundt pan and set aside. 

2) Preheat the oven to 180C

3) Sift flour, potato starch and baking powder into a bowl, then add castor sugar (while reserving 2 tbsp of sugar for whisking the egg whites.)

4) To whisk the egg whites: first dry the whisk and bowl thoroughly (no droplets of water allowed!), and then rub down the insides of the bowl and the whisks with a slice of lime/lemon. Pour the egg whites into the bowl along with 2 tbsp of castor sugar and then whisk on medium speed until soft peaks appear, then increase to high speed until medium peaks form. 

5) Fold the flour mixture into the egg mixture gently, and then the cooled butter.

6) Pour the batter into the bundt pan and rap the pan on a tablecloth to let any air bubbles escape. Bake for 30-40 minutes (if using a single bundt pan. If using smaller cake pans, check for doneness with a wooden toothpick about 20-30 minutes. It is done when the wooden toothpick comes out of the middle of the cake clean, with no wet batter coating the sides of the toothpick.)

7) Cool slightly before turning out of the cake tin.

Note
I used David Lebovitz's Hot Fudge Sauce to make the chocolate sauce, but decided that I wanted a much runnier consistency than hot fudge, and so I added milk in and stirred over a fire until I reached my desired consistency. It's not the easiest way to approach a recipe, and if I were to do it again, I would reach for his Chocolate Sauce recipe instead.