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SPONGECAKE (a German recipe)
Take half a pound of sifted sugar and the yolks of ten eggs; stir these ingredients for a quarter of an hour. Add six ounces of butter beaten to a cream, half a pound of fine flour, and the grated peel of a lemon and its juice. When these are thoroughly stirred in, add the whites of the ten eggs whipped to a snow. Stir all well together. Then take one or two moulds and butter them. Three-parts fill the moulds, strew thin slices of almonds and some coarsely-powdered sugar on top, and bake the cakes in a moderate oven.
A lemon-scented butter sponge that takes all its lift from eggs — there is no baking powder, and none should be added. The whipped whites are the whole engine, so everything else should be ready before they go in.
- Quantities in metricHalf a pound of sugar is 225g, six ounces of butter 170g, half a pound of flour 225g. Ten eggs at modern large size give roughly 200g yolk and 350g white; nineteenth-century eggs ran smaller, so if the batter seems slack, hold back one white.
- The quarter-hour of stirringBeating yolks and sugar for fifteen minutes by hand is what a stand mixer does in four to five on high speed. Stop when the mixture is pale, thick, and falls from the whisk in a ribbon that holds its shape for a second or two.
- Folding, not stirring"Stir all well together" is the one instruction to disobey. Fold the whipped whites in with a spatula in three additions, cutting down and lifting, and stop while a few streaks remain. Overmixing here is the difference between a light crumb and a dense, greasy layer at the base.
- Butter temperatureButter "beaten to a cream" means soft and aerated, around 20C. If it is cold it will seize into lumps in the egg foam; if it is melted it will collapse the whites.
- A moderate oven350F / 175C. For a single large mould this is a long bake — expect 45 to 55 minutes; two smaller moulds will take 30 to 35. Test with a skewer in the thickest part.
- The mouldsThe recipe says only "one or two moulds"; a fluted tube mould (Gugelhupf) or a plain deep cake tin both suit the batter. Butter well and dust with flour or fine breadcrumbs; the sugar-and-almond topping goes on the raw batter, and if the cake is turned out it will end up on the base, so it must release cleanly.
- Coarsely-powdered sugarMost likely loaf sugar coarsely pounded, which behaves much like modern nib or pearl sugar (Hagelzucker) in holding its shape rather than dissolving; crushed sugar cubes will stand in. The recipe asks for thin slices of almonds rather than flakes.
- YieldEnough for roughly one 23cm tube cake or two 20cm rounds, serving ten to twelve. Wrapped, it should keep three or four days.
Cassell's flags this as German, and the batter bears it out: this is not the fat-free Biskuit of a true sponge but the enriched, butter-and-egg construction that German bakers used for Sandtorte and Gugelhupf, leavened entirely by beaten egg at a time when chemical raising agents, though commercially available in Britain from the 1840s and 50s, were not yet universal in domestic baking. The most telling detail is the coarse sugar strewn on top, which is Hagelzucker, still sold in German and Scandinavian bakeries and still used the same way. Victorian compendia like Cassell's are often said to have collected such recipes freely from the Continent, usually with no more attribution than the parenthetical "a German recipe", and the long hand-beating they demand is a reminder that the labour in a Victorian kitchen was assumed rather than budgeted for.