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Sponge Ginger Cake
1/2 cup sour milk 1/2 cup molasses 1/4 cup butter 1 egg 1/2 tablespoon ginger 2 cups flour 1 teaspoon soda Beat together the molasses, butter, egg, milk and ginger; then stir in the flour and last the soda dissolved in a very little hot water. Bake in shallow square tins.
A plain molasses gingerbread of the kind meant to be baked, cut in squares, and eaten the same day. The only technical point of substance is the soda going in last, dissolved and at the very end.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given; bake at 350F in an 8-inch square pan, greased and lined, for 25-30 minutes until the centre springs back. "Shallow square tins" means a thin cake, about an inch deep, not a loaf.
- Soda last, then straight into the ovenThe soda dissolved in hot water begins reacting with the sour milk and molasses at once. Fold it in, get the batter into the pan and into a preheated oven immediately, or the rise is spent before it bakes.
- Sour milkGenuine soured raw milk is not what modern pasteurised milk becomes when it goes off. Use buttermilk, or half a cup of milk with a teaspoon and a half of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will not sweeten the cake enough on its own. The sugar in this recipe comes entirely from the molasses, so the cake is only mildly sweet by current standards.
- ButterA quarter cup is 4 tablespoons, or 55 g. Soften it rather than melting it fully, since the method is a simple beat-together rather than a creaming.
- GingerHalf a tablespoon is 1 1/2 teaspoons of ground dried ginger. Ground spice loses potency fast; if the jar is more than a year old, use two teaspoons.
- Flour and saltTwo cups is about 250 g of all-purpose flour. No salt is called for; salted butter would have supplied some. A quarter teaspoon added with the flour improves it noticeably.
- YieldOne 8-inch square, cut into nine or sixteen pieces. It keeps two days well wrapped, and many find molasses cakes of this kind moister on the second day.
"Sponge" here describes texture rather than method, and it is generous: there is no whipped egg foam, only one egg and a chemical rise. Recipes of this shape depend on a combination common in nineteenth-century American baking, sour milk and molasses reacting with saleratus or soda, and they became more frequent in print as packaged baking soda grew cheaper and more reliable over the middle of that century. Molasses remained a common everyday sweetener well after refined sugar was available, being cheaper, and ginger was among the spices most likely to be kept on hand. The appeal of a cake like this is plain enough: five minutes to mix, one bowl, no creaming, and ingredients available year round.