Home › Breads, Rolls, Muffins, Etc. › Cream Sponge Cake
Cream Sponge Cake
Ruth A. Willers.
Sift three times Swansdown flour before measuring. Place 1½ tablespoon cornstarch in a cup and then fill the cup with the sifted flour-pour this into sieve and add 1½ t baking powder and ¼ t salt. Sift all together three times. Separate 4 eggs and beat yolks until lemon colored, then beat into them 1 C sugar and 3 T cold water. Add flavoring and the sifted flour. Lastly fold in the stiffly beaten whites. Pour into an ungreased tin. Bake slowly the same as an Angel Food Cake.
Note: Mrs. Reid makes this cake with 3 eggs. Mrs. H. T. Mason.
A foam cake built on whole eggs rather than whites alone, with cornstarch lightening the flour. The typesetting in this book has garbled at least two measurements, so read the quantities with care before you start.
- The cornstarch and saltThe printed page gives 1½ tablespoons cornstarch and ¼ teaspoon salt, which is what our text now reads. Both figures are sound for a cake built on a single cup of flour.
- Swansdown flourSwans Down was, and still is, a bleached soft-wheat cake flour. Any cake flour substitutes directly; all-purpose will give a tougher, coarser crumb even with the cornstarch.
- The cornstarch-in-the-cup trickPut the cornstarch in the measuring cup first, then fill to the line with sifted flour. You end up with one cup total, not a cup plus cornstarch. Sifting three times after is what gives this cake its fineness.
- "Bake slowly"The book gives no temperature; period angel food practice points to a moderate oven, roughly 300 to 325F. Reckon on something in the region of 45 to 55 minutes in a tube pan; the cake is done when it springs back and a straw comes out clean.
- Ungreased tin, and whyThe batter climbs the sides of the pan as it sets. Greasing it robs the cake of its rise. Use a tube pan with a removable bottom and do not line it.
- CoolingInvert the pan immediately — over a bottle neck if it has no feet — and leave it until stone cold. A foam cake left upright collapses under its own weight.
- FlavoringUnspecified, as was normal. A teaspoon of vanilla, or half vanilla and half lemon extract, suits the cake.
- YieldOne small tube cake. With only a cup of flour and four eggs the batter is modest, so use a smaller tube pan; six to eight servings. Mrs. Reid's three-egg version gives a shorter cake in the same pan.
Cream sponge sits between the two great American foam cakes of the era: angel food, which uses whites only, and true sponge, which uses whole eggs beaten separately. The instruction to sift six times in total reflects a kitchen where flour arrived lumpy and unbleached-in-the-bag. That the recipe names Swans Down by brand is telling; branded cake flour is generally said to have reached American grocers in the late nineteenth century, and its milling companies are often credited with promoting foam cakes heavily as proof of the product. The double attribution at the head and foot, with Mrs. Reid's variation noted in between, is the compiling committee's fingerprint: three women baking the same cake slightly differently, and nobody willing to say which was right.