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Crisco Sponge Cake
3 eggs 1 cupful sugar 1/2 cupful Crisco 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 1/4 cupfuls flour 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful orange extract 1/2 cupful cold water Cream Crisco; add salt, yolks of eggs well beaten, and sugar, and beat for five minutes, add orange extract and cold water. Beat up whites of eggs to a stiff froth and add alternately with the flour sifted with the baking powder. Divide into Criscoed and floured gem pans and bake in a moderate oven for fifteen minutes.
Sufficient for twelve cakes.
A shortening-based cake from a Crisco promotional cookbook, baked as individual cakes rather than a loaf. It is closer to a plain butter cupcake than to a true fatless sponge, and it behaves like one.
- Gem pansGem pans are cast-iron or tin muffin pans with roughly 12 cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin, filled about two-thirds, is the direct equivalent; paper liners work in place of greasing and flouring.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F (period "moderate" is usually read as about 350-375F). Fifteen minutes is right for muffin-sized cakes; start checking at twelve, since they dry out quickly once the tops spring back.
- "Criscoed"Simply greased with shortening. Any neutral solid fat or a pan spray does the same job, and the flour dusting still helps if you are not using liners.
- The CriscoCrisco was originally hydrogenated cottonseed oil, with a firmer, waxier body than today's reformulated version. Modern all-vegetable shortening creams a little softer; the same weight of butter also works and gives more flavor, though a slightly denser crumb.
- FlourA cupful here is roughly 4 oz. Modern all-purpose may be stronger; measure by spooning and leveling, or weigh 5 oz total, and stop folding as soon as the streaks disappear.
- Five minutes of beatingThat instruction predates household electric mixers and is not padding; creaming fat, yolks and sugar builds aeration that works alongside the baking powder and the beaten whites. Three to four minutes on medium with a stand mixer gets you there.
- Folding orderAdding whipped whites and flour alternately is the hinge. Fold by thirds with a spatula, not the beater, or the whites collapse and you get a heavy, tight crumb.
- Orange extractModern extracts vary in strength; taste-check, or substitute the grated zest of one orange for a cleaner flavor.
- YieldTwelve small cakes. They keep about two days at room temperature in a tin and freeze well unfrosted.
Crisco was introduced in 1911 and its makers, following the pattern set by other branded-ingredient campaigns of the era, put out cookbooks in which every recipe called for the product by name " hence "Criscoed" pans as a verb. The pitch was that a shelf-stable vegetable fat could replace both butter and lard, with no need for an icebox. Calling this a sponge cake stretches the term: a true sponge relies on eggs alone for lift, while this one carries half a cup of fat and two teaspoons of baking powder. By the 1910s American home bakers used "sponge" loosely for any light cake raised in part with beaten whites, and chemical leavening had been ordinary in domestic kitchens for two generations.