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Hot Water Sponge Cake
1 tablespoon lemon juice 1 teaspoon baking powder 2 tablespoons hot water 3 egg whites 1 teaspoon salt Beat egg yolks until lemon-colored and thick; add sugar and continue beating. Add flour, mixed and sifted with baking powder and salt, hot water, and whites of eggs beaten until stiff, with lemon juice added.
The ingredient list as printed is incomplete: the yolks, sugar and flour are called for in the method but their quantities were lost in the setting of the page. Anything you make from this will be a reconstruction, so read the points below before starting.
- The missing quantitiesThree egg whites are listed, and the method appears to use the yolks of the same eggs. Sponges of this kind commonly run to something like 1 cup sugar and 1 cup flour for three eggs, but the original figures cannot be recovered from this page, so treat any numbers as an educated guess rather than the book's intent.
- The saltOne teaspoon of salt is far more than a three-egg sponge wants and may well be a misprint; a quarter teaspoon or less is what such a cake needs. The original amount cannot be recovered from this page.
- No baking direction at allThe recipe stops at the batter; the page gives no oven instruction whatever. Cakes of this type are usually baked around 325-350F, in an ungreased tube pan for roughly 35 to 45 minutes, or in a shallow sheet for 20 to 25, until the top springs back and a straw comes out clean -- but those figures are modern practice, not the book's.
- Hot water is the pointThe two tablespoons of hot water thin the yolk foam so it folds into the whites without deflating them, and give the crumb a moister, more tender texture than a plain sponge. Add it warm, not boiling, and add it to the yolk mixture rather than to the whites.
- Beating the yolks"Lemon-colored and thick" means several minutes with an electric mixer at high speed, until the yolks pale and fall from the beater in a ribbon that holds its shape for a moment. Much of the lift comes from the beaten eggs, though the teaspoon of baking powder is doing real work too.
- The lemon juice in the whitesAdding the acid to the whites as they finish stabilizes the foam, the same job cream of tartar does in a modern angel food. Beat to stiff but still glossy peaks, not dry and crumbly, or the whites will refuse to fold in evenly.
- Folding orderThe recipe adds the sifted dry ingredients, the hot water and the stiff whites in that order; fold rather than beat, taking the whites in two or three additions with a large spatula. Overworking at this stage is the usual cause of a dense, rubbery sponge.
- Cooling and yieldIf baked in a tube pan, invert it and let the cake cool upside down before turning it out, as with angel food. A three-egg sponge will serve six to eight.
Hot water sponge cakes appear all through American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the sponge family was the workhorse of the home dessert repertoire: no butter, no creaming, and no need for a reliable oven thermometer so much as a steady hand with a whisk. The trick of loosening the yolk foam with a spoonful or two of hot water is generally credited in these books simply to experience rather than to any one cook. Its presence in Lowney's Cook Book is a reminder that a chocolate company's promotional cookbook was expected to be a complete household manual, chocolate chapters and all. The ingredient list here is garbled, with a line evidently dropped, though the cause is not recorded.