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Sponge Layer Cake
3 large eggs 1½ C sugar 1½ level t baking powder 3/4 C hot milk 1½ C flour Beat eggs well, add sugar gradually, then flour sifted with baking powder. Add milk last. Bake in layers and put together with following custard: 1 C milk 1 C sugar 1 egg 1 T butter Dust cake with powdered sugar. 1 T flour 1 T corn starch 1 t vanilla Mary E. Kern.
A hot-milk sponge — whole eggs beaten to a foam, no separated whites, no creamed butter. The typography here has scrambled the two ingredient lists, so read carefully before you start.
- Sort the two lists firstThe filling is 1 C milk, 1 C sugar, 1 egg, 1 T butter, 1 T flour, 1 T corn starch, 1 t vanilla — the last three lines drifted into the middle of the instructions. The cake itself uses only eggs, sugar, baking powder, hot milk and flour.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was normal when ranges had no thermometer. Bake layers of this type at 350F, 20 to 25 minutes, until the top springs back and a tester comes out clean.
- Pans"Bake in layers" is all the recipe says; it gives no number or size. Two or three 8- or 9-inch round tins, greased and floured, suit this quantity. The batter is thin and pourable; it will look alarmingly loose compared with a butter cake.
- The hinge: beat the eggs long enoughThere is no fat, and although 1½ t baking powder to 1½ C flour is a conventional amount, the beaten whole eggs and sugar still do much of the lifting. Beat them at high speed for a good 5 to 8 minutes, until pale, thick and ribbon-forming. Then fold in the flour and stir in the hot milk quickly and gently — overworking at that stage deflates everything you just built.
- Hot milk means hotHot rather than merely warm; scalded milk is the usual reading. It loosens the batter so it pours evenly, and hot milk is generally credited with a softer crumb than cold.
- "Level t" and "C"A level teaspoon, specified at a period when a spoonful might well be heaped. C is cup, T is tablespoon, t is teaspoon — though the abbreviations are not applied consistently from book to book.
- Cooking the custardWhisk sugar, flour and cornstarch with the egg, temper in the hot milk, then cook over low heat or a double boiler, stirring, until it thickens and just bubbles — starch-thickened fillings need that brief boil to lose their raw taste and set properly. Butter and vanilla go in off the heat. Cool completely before filling, or it will run out of the layers.
- SweetnessA full cup of sugar in one cup of milk is very sweet by current taste; two-thirds of a cup gives a less sweet filling, and the cake still reads as a dessert.
- YieldOne layer cake, roughly 8 to 10 servings. Powdered sugar on top instead of icing — the custard is doing the work.
Hot-milk sponge sits between the true fatless sponge and the butter cake, and it spread once chemical baking powder became cheap and reliable in American kitchens in the later nineteenth century: a measured spoonful of baking powder insures the egg foam, so the cook need not beat whites separately and pray. Recipes signed by a named contributor, as this one is by Mary E. Kern, are characteristic of community cookbooks assembled from members' own submissions. The custard filling, thickened with both flour and cornstarch, is the familiar "cream filling" of the period, used in layer cakes, cream pies and filled buns; the doubled thickeners give a firmer set than flour alone and a less gluey one than cornstarch alone.