Dessert recipes: orange chiffon cake, and sour cream coffee cake

In my days as a pastry chef, I made enormous wedding cakes, big enough to feed 200, and extravagantly decorated cakes with pulled- and blown-sugar decorations that were entered into competitions. When I bake at home, though, my cakes are much more simple, usually requiring nothing more than a light dusting of icing sugar. These are two cakes I make frequently.

This recipe comes from the book The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. The only things I have changed are that instead of using all orange juice, I use some lemon juice, so the cake is less sweet; and I add a lot more zest than she instructs.

You need a two-piece 25cm tube pan for this cake. Do not grease and flour it or spray it with pan-coating. You also need a large wire balloon whisk, for mixing the whipped egg whites into the batter (the whisk maintains the volume of the whites better than a spatula would).