Home › Breads, Rolls, Muffins, Etc. › Sponge Cup Cakes
Sponge Cup Cakes
Grated rind ½ lemon 1 C pastry flour 1/4 t salt Beat egg yolks until thick and lemon colored. Add sugar gradually, beating all the time. Add lemon juice, grated rind and egg whites which have been beaten until stiff. Partially mix by cutting and folding the egg whites. Then gradually fold in the flour which has been sifted twice with salt. Bake in ungreased muffin pans in moderate oven. Jean Smock. 14 C butter Yolks 4 eggs 14 C milk
The text as printed has been scrambled — part of the ingredient list has migrated to the bottom of the entry and the sugar quantity is missing altogether. What survives is a plain hot-water-free sponge baked in muffin tins, and it is workable if you read the list carefully before starting.
- The broken ingredient list"Grated rind 12 lemon" is the grated rind of half a lemon, and "14 C butter" and "14 C milk" are each a quarter cup that belong at the top of the list, not the bottom. The printed list gives only the yolks of four eggs; the whites called for in the method are presumably those same four, though no quantity is stated. The lemon juice the method uses is likewise missing from the list.
- The missing sugarNo sugar quantity is given anywhere in the printed recipe, though the method depends on it: "add sugar gradually, beating all the time." Period sponge cup cakes of this size generally use roughly three quarters of a cup to a cup of sugar against one cup of flour, but the book's own figure is simply lost and cannot be recovered from the text.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no figure; "moderate" conventionally corresponds to somewhere around 350 to 375F. Small sponge cakes in muffin tins take about 15 to 20 minutes; they are done when the tops spring back and a pick comes out clean.
- Why ungreased pansA sponge batter needs to grip the sides of the tin as it climbs. Greasing lets it slip and the cakes bake squat. Loosen the edges with a thin knife once they have cooled a few minutes.
- Butter and milk, if you use themThe method never says what to do with either. If you include them, melt the butter and warm the milk slightly, then fold them in at the very end, after the flour, pouring down the side of the bowl rather than into the middle of the batter. Cold fat dropped into a foam collapses it.
- Cutting and foldingThe instruction to "partially mix" the whites is deliberate. Leave the batter visibly streaky before the flour goes in, because the flour additions will finish the blending; anything fully smooth at that stage will be overworked by the time the flour is incorporated.
- FlourPastry flour is lower in protein than all-purpose. If you substitute all-purpose, remove about two tablespoons per cup and sift the full three times rather than twice.
- YieldFour eggs and a cup of flour fill roughly ten to twelve standard muffin cups, two thirds full each. Serve the day they are baked; sponge without much fat stales quickly.
The type is a lemon sponge in miniature, a descendant of the whisked egg cakes that carried on from the eighteenth century into the twentieth largely unchanged in method: beat the yolks and sugar to a ribbon, beat the whites separately, fold in flour, and let the eggs do all the lifting. Fundraising cook books compiled from members' own cards and slips are why such volumes carry contributors' names and why the typesetting can be so rough -- a line of ingredients dropping to the wrong end of the entry is a common casualty of the process. Jean Smock's recipe survives with her name attached and her sugar measurement lost.