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Three Eggs (Beat the eggs and sugar)
Beat the eggs and sugar together to a smooth cream; add the flour and baking-powder sifted, and the orange juice and rind. Mix all well together, and bake in a quick oven for a quarter of an hour.
When cold, ice it with French icing made of half a pound of icing sugar worked well with the juice of the orange; when well mixed, pour this all over the cake.
The ingredient list that headed this entry has been reduced to the title, so the method arrives without its quantities. The proportions are recoverable from standard practice of the period, but a note on each is worth having before you start.
- The missing quantitiesAll the original gives is "three eggs." Victorian sponge practice was to take the weight of the eggs in sugar and in flour or large eggs, roughly 6 oz (170 g) of each fff, with a teaspoon of baking powder, one orange's juice and its grated rind. Treat that as a reconstruction, not as the book's own figures.
- Beating is the whole cakeWith no butter and no separated whites, the only lift beyond the baking powder comes from air beaten into the eggs and sugar. Work them until the mixture is pale, thick and holds a ribbon on the surface for a few seconds ff five to eight minutes in a stand mixer. Fold the sifted flour in by hand; stirring it in knocks the air straight back out.
- A quick oven"quick" is generally taken to mean somewhere in the region of 400-450F (200-230C); the book itself gives no figure. That is defensible for a thin sponge in a shallow tin, which is what the quarter-hour timing implies, but most modern tins and ovens will do better at 375F (190C) for 20-25 minutes. Test with a skewer rather than the clock.
- Orange rindGrate only the coloured zest; the white pith beneath is bitter. Rubbing the zest into the sugar before the eggs go in releases far more oil than adding it at the end.
- French icingHere this simply means a poured glac f icing ff icing sugar slackened with liquid, no egg white and no cooking. Half a pound is about 2 cups (225 g); the juice of one orange, 3 f4 tablespoons, is close to right, but add it a spoonful at a time. You want it to fall from the spoon in a thick ribbon and settle level.
- Ice it coldThe instruction to wait until the cake is cold is not optional. Poured over anything still warm, the icing thins, runs off the sides and soaks into the crumb instead of setting to a glaze.
- YieldThe book names no tin. A three-egg sponge of this kind would suit an 8-inch round or a small square tin and yield around 8 modest slices. It is best the day it is made; a fatless sponge stales quickly.
Fatless sponges of this kind -- eggs and sugar beaten to a foam, flour folded in, chemical leavening added as insurance -- are common in the "fancy bread and cakes" chapters of late nineteenth-century cookery manuals, by which time commercial baking powder was widely available in ordinary kitchens. The orange doing double duty, its zest in the crumb and its juice in the icing, is a thrifty touch typical of the genre. "French icing" is a loose label in Victorian books; here it plainly denotes a poured, uncooked sugar glaze, as opposed to royal icing, which is stiffened with egg white and spread or piped.