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Velvet Sponge Cake
Two cups sugar, six eggs leaving out the whites of three, one cup boiling hot water, two and one half cups flour, one table-spoon baking-powder in the flour; beat the yolks a little, add the sugar and beat fifteen minutes; add the three beaten whites, and the cup of boiling water just before the flour; flavor with a tea-spoon lemon extract and bake in three layers, putting between them icing made by adding to the three whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth, six dessert-spoons of pulverized sugar to each egg, and lemon to flavor. -Mrs. Wm. Brown, Massillon.
A hot-water sponge stretched into three layers, from the era when a cook's arm was the mixer. The method is sound; the timings assume no electricity.
- The fifteen minutes of beatingThat is the hinge. Whipping yolks and sugar for a quarter of an hour by hand builds the foam that lifts this cake. In a stand mixer on medium-high, 5 to 6 minutes will get you there: the mixture should fall from the beater in a thick ribbon and hold a trail on the surface.
- Why boiling waterThe hot water is added just before the flour and it is deliberate — it thins the yolk foam so the flour can be folded in with a few strokes rather than beaten in, and it gelatinizes a little starch for a tender, moist crumb. Add it in a slow stream while mixing, then fold the flour in by hand and stop as soon as it disappears.
- Egg countNineteenth-century recipes name no egg size, and period eggs were not standardised, so they may well have run smaller than today's large. Six large eggs (about 12 oz in shell) work; if your eggs are extra-large, use five plus one extra yolk so the batter is not too slack.
- Baking powderOne tablespoon for 2½ cups flour is a heavy hand by modern standards, and nineteenth-century powders were single-acting and variable in strength rather than the consistent double-acting product sold now. Two teaspoons is plenty; more will give the cake a coarse, faintly soapy crumb.
- Oven and pansNo temperature is given; domestic ranges of the period had no reliable gauge. Bake at 350F in three greased and floured 8- or 9-inch round pans, 18 to 25 minutes, until the top springs back and a tester comes out clean. Sponge batters set fast and dry out faster.
- The icing measurementA dessert-spoon is about two teaspoons, so six per white is roughly ¼ cup pulverized (confectioners') sugar for each of the three whites — a thin, pourable glaze, not a modern fluffy frosting. Expect it to soak slightly into the layers, which is how it was meant to behave.
- That icing is uncookedRaw egg white beaten with sugar and spread on a cooled cake is never heated, and raw whites carry a real if small salmonella risk, particularly for children, pregnant women and anyone immune-compromised. Use a current recipe for boiled (seven-minute) icing or one built on pasteurized whites instead.
- YieldA three-layer cake serving 10 to 12. It keeps poorly — sponge with no butter goes dry by the second day, so serve it the day it is made.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) grew out of Ohio church and community collections, and the attributions to named contributors from towns like Massillon, Marysville and Springfield are the book's signature: it reads as a directory of who in the state could be trusted with which dish. Velvet sponge belongs to the hot-water sponge family, which is often said to have spread in American books of the 1870s and 1880s alongside the growing availability of commercial baking powder rom from from beaten egg but hedges with chemical leavening, and gets its tenderness from boiling water rather than butter. Sponge batter split across shallow layer pans rather than one deep tin, with the plain lemon-scented egg-white icing between layers, was the cheapest way to make three thin cakes look like an occasion.