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Children's Sponge
1 1/2 cups Gold Medal flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup sugar 2 eggs Milk or cream Break the eggs into a cup and fill with milk or cream. Mix and sift dry ingredients, combine with the milk and egg, beat all together for five minutes. Bake ten minutes in muffin pans.
A one-cup, no-fat quick cake in the plainest possible form: the egg-and-milk trick sets the liquid measure for you. Two things the original leaves out are the oven temperature and the salt.
- The egg-in-a-cup measureBreak the two eggs into a 1-cup measure, then top up with milk or cream to the 1-cup line. Two large eggs come to a scant 1/2 cup, so you will be adding a little over 1/2 cup milk. This is the whole liquid quantity for the recipe.
- Oven heatNone is given, which was common in books of this period. For small cakes baked in ten minutes, a hot oven of about 400F suits; much cooler and they may not set in the time stated, much hotter and the tops color before the centers are done.
- Add saltThere is none in the ingredient list, and with no butter to carry flavor the cakes taste flat without it. A scant 1/4 teaspoon stirred into the dry ingredients is enough.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to 1 1/2 cups flour sits at the high end of current practice. If the taste of the leavening strikes you as assertive, 1 1/2 teaspoons of modern double-acting powder will still raise the batter.
- The five-minute beatingThis is the hinge. With no butter and no separated whites, all the lightness comes from air beaten into the eggs and sugar, so the time is not padding. Two to three minutes on medium speed with a stand or hand mixer does the work of five minutes by hand; the batter should go pale and noticeably thick.
- Pan and yieldThe batter is thin and the recipe makes about 12 small muffin-pan cakes or 9 standard ones, filled two-thirds. Grease the cups well or use liners, since a fatless batter grips the tin.
- Doneness and keepingTen minutes is right for small cups; test at eight, as these overbake quickly and turn dry. Being fat-free they stale within a day, so serve them the same afternoon, warm, with jam or fruit.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was a promotional volume from Washburn-Crosby, the Minneapolis milling firm whose Gold Medal brand took its name from a prize won at an 1880 milling exposition and which later became General Mills; books like this were sold or given away cheaply to keep a specific sack of flour in the kitchen. "Sponge" here is used loosely, as it often was in American household books, for a plain cake made without butter -- though this one leans on baking powder as well as beaten egg -- rather than for the separated-egg sponge of pastry cookery. The frugality is the point: two eggs, no fat, a cup of sugar, and a measuring trick that sets the liquid quantity for the cook.