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Orange Sponge Cake
Beat three eggs hard for five minutes.
Then add one cup of granulated sugar and beat for three minutes. Add one-half cup of cold water, two cups of flour sifted with two teaspoons of baking powder. Bake in two deep jelly tins or in a biscuit tin from fifteen to twenty minutes.
Thicken the unbeaten white of one egg with confectioner's sugar. Add the juice and grated peel of one-half an orange, and more sugar till the frosting is thick enough to spread on the cake.
This cake is more tender and delicate the day after it is baked. Spread cut-up peaches or oranges between the layers and sprinkle powdered sugar over the top to make a dessert.-Annabel Lee.
The cake itself is a straightforward water sponge, but the frosting is uncooked egg white and is the reason for the caution above.
- The frosting is raw eggAn unbeaten egg white thickened with confectioner's sugar is never heated at any point, and the recipe itself suggests the cake is better kept until the following day. Raw shell eggs carry a Salmonella risk that was not understood when this was written; use a current icing recipe rather than this one.
- The cake is safe, the icing is notNothing about the batter is a problem — it bakes through. If you want to make the sponge, pair it with any modern glaze or a fruit-and-sugar finish, which the recipe itself offers as an alternative.
- No oven temperature is givenA cake of this type would suit a modern oven around 350°F. The recipe gives fifteen to twenty minutes for either the jelly tins or the biscuit tin.
- "Deep jelly tins"Round layer pans, most likely in the 8- to 9-inch range. A "biscuit tin" here is presumably a shallow rectangular baking pan, baked as a single slab and cut into squares.
- No fat, no saltThis is a water sponge: the structure comes entirely from beaten whole eggs plus baking powder. Modern practice would add about 1/4 teaspoon of salt and a half teaspoon of vanilla, neither of which the original bothers with.
- Five minutes of beatingThat figure assumes a hand whisk or a rotary egg beater. With a stand mixer on high, three to four minutes will bring three eggs to the pale, thick, ribbon stage; the sugar addition then needs only two or three more.
- Fold the flourThe flour and baking powder go in after the water with as little working as possible. Sift them together and fold — beating at this stage collapses the foam the first five minutes built.
- Confectioner's sugar quantityThe original gives none, only "till thick enough to spread." One egg white will take roughly two cups of sifted confectioner's sugar, but the amount is genuinely open.
- YieldTwo layers, serving roughly eight to ten depending on pan size. The note about the cake being better the next day is the recipe's own — a lean sponge firms and moistens on standing.
The water sponge — whole eggs beaten to a foam, sugar, cold water, flour — sits between the old egg-only sponges of the eighteenth century and the butter cakes that chemical leavening made easy. Baking powder became widely available to American households in the second half of the nineteenth century, and recipes like this one show the transitional moment: the cook still beats eggs hard for five minutes as if no leavening existed, then adds two teaspoons of baking powder as insurance. The signature at the end is typical of periodicals that built their recipe stock from reader contributions printed under the sender's name; "Annabel Lee" may well be a pen name borrowed from Poe. The closing suggestion — fruit between the layers, powdered sugar on top — turns the same cake into a dessert without a second recipe, a thrift typical of the period's household writing.