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Milk Sponge Cake
2 eggs 1 cup sugar 6 tablespoons hot milk 1 teaspoon vanilla or lemon extract 1 cup flour 1 1/2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/8 teaspoon salt Beat yolks of eggs until thick; add half of sugar slowly, beating continually; add hot milk, remainder of sugar and whites of eggs beaten until stiff; add flavoring; add flour, salt and baking powder which have been sifted together. Bake in ungreased tube pan in moderate oven about 25 minutes.
A hot-milk sponge, leavened with both beaten whites and baking powder — a forgiving cake that depends almost entirely on how gently the flour goes in.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" in books of this period is usually taken as about 350-375F. Twenty-five minutes suits a small tube pan (the recipe does not give a size); test with a skewer a few minutes early, since a thin sponge overbakes quickly and turns dry.
- Fold, do not stirThe hinge of the recipe. Once the sifted flour, salt and baking powder go in, work with a spatula in as few strokes as will incorporate the dry streaks. Beating at this stage develops gluten and collapses the whites, giving a tough, low cake.
- Hot milkSix tablespoons is 3/8 cup, that is, half a cup less two tablespoons. Heat it to steaming, not boiling, and add it while hot; it dissolves the sugar and loosens the batter, which is the point of the method.
- Ungreased pan, and it mattersThe batter climbs the sides of the pan as it rises and needs the grip. Do not grease or line it. Invert the pan over a bottle neck to cool, then loosen with a thin knife.
- Royal Baking PowderThe brand is called for by name in the ingredient list, as promotional booklets did. Any modern double-acting baking powder works at the same measure; 1 1/2 teaspoons to 1 cup of flour is on the generous side but correct for a sponge that also relies on egg.
- EggsThe recipe does not specify size; room-temperature eggs beat up best. Yolks beaten "until thick" means pale and ribbon-forming; the whites want stiff but not dry peaks.
- YieldOne small tube cake, perhaps eight modest servings; the recipe gives no yield. It stales fast -- best the day it is made, or split and served with fruit and cream.
This is a hot-milk sponge, a category that spread widely in American home baking once chemical leavening became cheap and reliable. The older true sponge relied on eggs alone and demanded long beating; adding baking powder and scalded milk produced something nearly as light with a fraction of the labour and a moister crumb, which is why versions appear in promotional baking-powder booklets of the early twentieth century. Those booklets — issued by manufacturers such as Royal, and containing recipes that call for the sponsor's product by name in the ingredient list — were among the most widely distributed cookbooks in America, though the standardisation of cup-and-teaspoon measurement is generally traced to the cookery writers and domestic-science schools of the same period.