Angelfood Cake in Aruba!

I am now in Oranjestad, Aruba. It is the Dutch part of the Caribbean Islands. It is the first time that I am here, so of course I was very excited to go out of the ship for a little while and see how everything looks like.

Now at the same time there were three other big cruise ships in Port so there must be a lot of tourists, but the town is actually so big that there is plenty of space, tons and tons of shops. It is actually all about shopping and partying here. Everything is duty free and all the ships are of course promoting the shopping.

Otherwise town is ok, but nothing to write about. It could be anywhere in the world with beaches, discos and plenty of shops. There are some pretty houses some museums and yes….casinos. The island is not so poor like the rest of the West Indies one can see that immediately.

There was one restaurant I saw, nice garden to eat under big trees and quite a funny menu, so I had to make a photo, one doesn’t get served goat every day.

Talking about food, we still need to do our dessert for Valentines. I was debating what would be best and think that most probably just strawberries and cream would be a great choice, easy to do and the perfect food for lovers, but that would be too easy, I like to go just a little wilder than that. So I thought we do a Strawberry Angel Food Cake. Here we go

Strawberry Angel Food Cake

Round sponge sheet (Buy in the shop)
Brandy
Fresh strawberries
Whipped cream with a little Vanilla Essence and sugar in it

Cut the sponge in small rings (use an empty can like baked bean can)
Then cut the individual rings in about 1 cm (0.3 inch) thick discs.
Add Brandy and sugar in equal proportions in a heavy based pan and bring to the boil to melt the sugar, and then cool the syrup down completely
Put one disc in the bottom of the ring and soak with a little Brandy syrup
Then top with cut strawberries.
Top with a little whipped cream
Repeat with another layer of sponge, berries and cream.
Top with a last layer of sponge, press down gently to compact the cake a bit, cut out a ring of marzipan and put on the sponge, carefully un-mold the cake, garnish with a strawberry.

Serve with Mango puree

So, that was the last part of the Valentines Menu Cycle and I hope it gave you some ideas what one could do. We are busy here with creating recipe cards for the company and I will adapt some of them for you to try out, so there is still so much more to come. We are now on the way back to Miami, will be for two days at sea, then turn around and back to the Caribbean again. I will be on the ship for one more cruise before moving on to the next challenge.