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Sponge Drops
Use rule for Lady Fingers. Drop from a tablespoon in rounds the size of a silver dollar on buttered sheet. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and bake as Lady Fingers. ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon milk flavoring
A cross-reference recipe: the batter is borrowed wholesale from the Lady Fingers entry, and only the shaping and size change. A few things need sorting out before you start.
- The ingredient list does not belong to this recipeHalf a cup of butter, a cup of sugar, a tablespoon of milk and flavoring reads as a butter frosting, not a sponge batter — sponge drops of this type contain no butter at all. It appears to be a stray fragment belonging to a neighbouring entry. Ignore it and use the Lady Fingers rule as instructed.
- What the borrowed rule actually isA lady finger batter of this era is eggs separated and beaten, a modest amount of sugar, sifted flour and flavoring, with the whites folded in last. Without the Lady Fingers page in front of you the recipe cannot be made; go and read it first, since the whole method lives there.
- Silver dollar sizeA US silver dollar is about 1.5 inches across. The batter spreads, so drop them at least two inches apart on the sheet.
- Buttered sheetButter alone on a bare pan invites sticking with a lean egg-foam batter. Parchment or a silicone mat is the modern equivalent and lets the drops lift off intact.
- OvenThe recipe sends you to the Lady Fingers page for the oven and specifies nothing itself. Lady fingers of this kind are generally baked hot and fast, for only a few minutes, and should come out set and barely coloured at the edges; a slower oven dries them into biscuits.
- The sugarSift the powdered sugar over the drops just before they go in, and knock off the excess. It sets into the thin crackled crust that distinguishes these from a plain sponge cookie.
- Handling the batterThe hinge is speed. Once the whites are folded in, drop and bake immediately; a beaten-egg batter left standing deflates and the drops bake flat and tough.
- YieldYield depends on whichever Lady Fingers rule you are working from; a three-egg batter would give something on the order of two to three dozen drops at this size.
Sponge drops are lady fingers without the finger — the same eggy, butterless batter piped or spooned into rounds rather than the long shapes that gave the original its name. The batter itself is the old European savoiardi or biscuit à la cuillère, "spoon biscuit," a name often taken to point back to a spooned rather than piped batter. Lowney's, published by a chocolate company to sell chocolate, still carried a full complement of plain cakes and small dry cookies like these, partly because they were the standard base for charlottes and trifles and partly because a cookbook that only sold cocoa would not have earned a place on the kitchen shelf. The stray butter-and-sugar line at the foot of this entry is likely a reminder that these books were typeset quickly.