Home › S › Sponge Cake (INGREDIENTS for large cake)
Sponge Cake (INGREDIENTS for large cake)
INGREDIENTS for large cake. The weight of 8 eggs in pounded loaf sugar, the weight of 5 in flour, the rind of 1 lemon, 1 tablespoonful of brandy.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 2d.
Put the eggs into one side of the scale, and take the weight of 8 in pounded loaf sugar, and the weight of 5 in good dry flour. Separate the yolks from the whites of the eggs; beat the former, put them into a saucepan with the sugar, and let them remain over the fire until milk-warm, keeping them well stirred. Then put them into a basin, add the grated lemon-rind mixed with the brandy, and stir these well together, dredging in the flour very gradually.
Whisk the whites of the eggs to a very stiff froth, stir them to the flour, &c., and beat the cake well for hour. Put it into a buttered mould strewn with a little finesifted sugar, and bake the cake in a quick oven for 1½ hour. Care must be taken SPONGE-CAKE.
SPONGE CAKE. that it is put into the oven immediately, or it will not be light. The flavouring of this cake may be varied by adding a few drops of essence of almonds, or a little orange-flower water, instead of the grated lemon-rind.
TIME.-1 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A pre-baking-powder sponge that relies entirely on air beaten into eggs, with the proportions set by weighing the eggs themselves. The text as printed is garbled in places (the running heads and a stray opening line have been swept into it), and the baking time is given twice with two different figures.
- Weighing by eggA Victorian egg in shell ran roughly 2 oz, so the weight of 8 eggs is about 1 lb (450 g) sugar and the weight of 5 about 10 oz (285 g) flour. Weigh your own eggs in the shell and match them; that is the point of the method and it self-corrects for egg size.
- Pounded loaf sugarLoaf sugar came as a hard refined cone that was broken and pounded fine. Caster sugar is the direct modern equivalent; granulated will not dissolve fully in the warmed yolks.
- "Milk-warm" yolksThis is blood heat, about 98-100F, and no more. Warming the yolks and sugar over gentle heat dissolves the sugar and lets the yolks whip to a far greater volume, but past about 150F they begin to set and you will have sweet scrambled egg. Use a bowl over barely simmering water and stir without stopping.
- Beating for an hourWith a stand mixer the warmed yolk-and-sugar mixture reaches the pale, ribbon stage in 5 to 8 minutes. The recipe's hour applies to beating the assembled batter and reflects hand-whisking, not a requirement of the mixture.
- Folding, not stirringThe instruction to "stir" the whites in and "beat the cake well" is of its period. Fold the stiff whites into the yolk base in three additions and dredge the flour over as you go; there is no chemical leavening to rescue deflated foam.
- The ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'quick oven' is usually glossed today as somewhere around 400-450F, which will set and colour the crust of a large sponge long before the centre cooks. Bake at 325-350F and judge by a clean skewer and a springy top. Note also that the recipe says 1½ hours in the text and 1 hour in the TIME line; at 350F a 1 lb-sugar sponge in a deep mould is likely to need 50-70 minutes.
- The mouldButter the tin and dust it with fine sugar rather than flour, as directed — the sugar gives the thin crisp shell characteristic of these cakes. A deep 8-9 inch round or a large ring mould suits this quantity.
- Into the oven at onceThis is the hinge. An egg-foam batter starts losing volume the moment beating stops, so have the oven at temperature and the mould prepared before the whites go in.
- FlavouringsModern almond extract is made from benzaldehyde or from bitter-almond oil with the hydrocyanic acid removed, and a few drops are unremarkable. Orange-flower water is still sold; it is potent, so start with a teaspoon.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 slices. The cake keeps poorly — it has no fat — and is best eaten within a day or two; sponge cakes were commonly served with fruit, cream or wine.
Sponge cake belongs to the family of foam-raised cakes that European bakers developed long before chemical leaveners: the Savoy biscuit, the Italian pan di Spagna, the naples biscuit, all built on the discovery that beaten egg alone will lift a batter. Proportioning the flour and sugar by the weight of the eggs, as here, is the older way of writing such recipes, and it survives in the pound cake and the quatre-quarts. Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) gathered a great many of these established English recipes rather than inventing them, and its costings — 1s. 2d. for a large sponge — were part of the appeal to the new middle-class housekeeper, who wanted to know what a dish would cost before she ordered the ingredients. The specification of loaf sugar is a reminder that sugar then came in hard refined cones to be broken up at home with nippers and pounded in a mortar; the fineness you achieved was your own business, and it mattered a great deal to a cake with nothing but egg to raise it.