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Cream Sponge Cake
Yolks 4 eggs Flour 1 cup sugar 1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder 3 tablespoons cold water 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 tablespoons corn-starch Whites 4 eggs 1 teaspoon lemon extract Beat yolks of eggs and water until thick and lemon-colored, add sugar gradually, and beat two minutes. Put corn-starch in a cup and fill cup with flour. Mix and sift corn-starch and flour with baking powder and salt, and add to first mixture. When thoroughly mixed add whites of eggs beaten until stiff, and flavoring. Bake thirty minutes in a moderate oven. This is an excellent mixture to use for whipped cream pies or to bake in an angel cake pan.
A hot-milk-free sponge leavened by beaten eggs with a little baking powder as insurance. The measuring trick at the center of it is easy to misread.
- The flour measurementThere is no separate quantity for flour: you put the 1 1/2 tablespoons of corn-starch into a one-cup measure and top it up with flour. Total dry starch is therefore one cup, of which about a tablespoon and a half is corn-starch. Sifted, that comes to roughly 4 oz / 115 g.
- Why corn-starchDisplacing part of the flour with corn-starch lowers the protein and gives the softer, finer crumb that period bakers wanted from a sponge. It is the same logic as modern cake flour, improvised at home.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says only 'moderate oven'; no figure is given. 'Moderate' is conventionally read as about 350F (175C). At 30 minutes in a tube pan the cake should be springy and just pulling from the sides; a shallow sheet will likely need rather less.
- Beating the yolksYolks with water beaten 'thick and lemon-colored' means several minutes at high speed until the mixture falls in a ribbon. Much of the structure comes from here, and underbeating is hard to make up later.
- FoldingAdd the sifted dry ingredients to the yolk foam, then fold in the stiff whites. Stiff, not dry: whites beaten past the point of gloss break up and will not incorporate without deflating the batter.
- Pan and coolingThe recipe suggests an angel cake pan but says nothing about preparing it; an ungreased tube pan, cooled inverted, is the usual handling for a batter of this type.
- YieldA modest tube cake, or two thin layers for the whipped-cream pie the recipe suggests.
- Lemon extractA teaspoon is assertive by modern taste. Half a teaspoon of extract plus the grated zest of a lemon gives a cleaner flavor.