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Sponge Cake (No. 2)
4 eggs (6 sometimes used) 1 cup granulated sugar 1 cup Five Roses flour ¼ teacup water 1 teaspoon baking powder Pinch of salt Vanilla.
Beat eggs separately. Bring sugar and water to a boil, pour boiling syrup slowly on eggs after mixing them. Then beat for 10 minutes before adding the flour, which you sift 4 times with the baking powder.
Then stir in lightly. Add salt and flavoring. Bake in a pan with a funnel in centre. Sprinkle the top lightly with sugar before putting in oven. Bake very slowly for 40 minutes. Don't open oven for first 15 minutes.
A hot-syrup sponge, closer in method to a genoise than to a creamed butter cake. The syrup does the work that long beating alone would otherwise have to do, so the order of operations matters more than the ingredient list.
- "Beat eggs separately"This means yolks in one bowl, whites in another, each beaten before being combined. Whites to soft peaks, yolks until pale and thick, then fold them together before the syrup goes in.
- The syrup is the hingeBring the sugar and water to a full boil, then pour it onto the eggs in a thin, steady stream with the mixer running. Dumped in at once it scrambles the yolks and you get sweet egg custard rather than a foam.
- "¼ teacup water"A period teacup was reckoned variously at roughly 4 to 6 fluid ounces, which puts this at about 2 to 3 tablespoons. The exact figure is not critical; the syrup only needs to dissolve the sugar and reach a boil.
- Ten minutes of beatingWith a stand mixer on medium-high, 5 to 6 minutes after the syrup is in will bring the batter to the pale, ribbon-thick stage the original wanted from ten minutes of hand or hand-crank work. Stop when a lifted beater leaves a trail that holds for a few seconds.
- The flourFive Roses was a Canadian hard-wheat household flour. Cake flour gives a finer crumb here; if using all-purpose, replace 2 tablespoons per cup with cornstarch. The four siftings with the baking powder are about even distribution and aeration, and are worth doing since the flour is folded into a delicate foam.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no figure; "very slowly" points to a slow oven, in the region of 300F or a little below, so treat any number as an approximation and watch the cake. Keeping the door shut for the first 15 minutes matters because the structure is set largely by steam and egg protein, and a draft collapses it.
- Pan and donenessAn ungreased tube pan is the "pan with a funnel in centre"; with only a cup of flour a smaller one is safer than a large. Forty minutes is a starting point; test with a skewer and allow longer if you use six eggs. Invert the pan and let the cake cool hanging so it does not sink under its own weight.
- YieldOne tube cake, 10 to 12 slices. It stales quickly, being nearly fatless, and is best the day it is baked.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal and distributed to purchasers of its flour, with much of the content credited to the Canadian housewives who sent recipes in — which may well account for the several numbered variants of the same cake. Sponge cakes like this one sit at a transitional point: the boiled-syrup method belongs to the older tradition of building lift entirely from beaten eggs, while the teaspoon of baking powder is a nod to the chemical leaveners that had become cheap and reliable by the turn of the twentieth century. The tube pan, familiar from angel food baking, has the practical advantage that a central funnel carries heat into the middle of a fragile batter.