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Children's Sponge Cake
1½ cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 cup sugar 2 eggs (broken in a cup) Fill cup up with milk or cream.
Stir all together in a mixing bowl.
Beat hard for 5 minutes. Bake about 10 minutes in muffin pan.
A one-bowl, butterless cake baked in muffin cups — the kind of quick tea cake a Canadian household turned out in an afternoon. Two things in the original need attention before you start: the leavening and the missing oven temperature.
- The cream of tartar has no partnerCream of tartar is an acid; on its own it does almost nothing for lift. It was commonly paired with baking soda at about two parts cream of tartar to one of soda, so the soda may well have dropped out of this listing. As written, the rise depends entirely on air beaten into the eggs and sugar.
- "2 eggs broken in a cup"Break the eggs into a standard 8-oz measuring cup, then top up with milk or cream to the 1-cup line. Two large eggs come to roughly ½ cup, so you are adding about ½ cup milk for 1 cup of liquid in total.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. Around 400F suits the stated 10 minutes; at 375F allow 12-14 minutes. They are done when the tops spring back and a tester comes out clean.
- Beat hard for 5 minutesThat instruction assumes a wooden spoon or a hand whisk. In a stand mixer roughly 3 minutes on medium-high should do instead. Do not extend it much past that with the flour already in — the batter will toughen.
- Order of mixing"Stir all together" works, but whisk the cream of tartar through the flour first so the acid is evenly distributed rather than sitting in streaks.
- No fat in the batterThere is no butter or shortening here, as in a sponge cake. Grease the muffin pan well or use papers; a lean batter sticks badly, and these cakes stale within a day. Eat them the same afternoon.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffin-sized cakes, filling each cup two-thirds full.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal and given away with, or sold cheaply alongside, sacks of Five Roses flour — a promotional cookbook of a kind the big North American millers all produced in the early twentieth century. Much of its content came from housewives who wrote in with their own receipts, which accounts for the telegraphic style and the occasional gap, such as the missing baking soda here. The name "Children's Sponge Cake" may signal its economy rather than any special appeal to children: no butter, two eggs, and a batter mixed and baked inside half an hour, the sort of thing made for after-school bread-and-butter hour rather than for company. Cream of tartar and soda, sold separately and combined by the cook, remained common in Canadian kitchens well into the era of commercial baking powder.