Home › Cake › Sponge Cake (Cups sugar eggs cup cold water)
Sponge Cake (Cups sugar eggs cup cold water)
1½ cups sugar, 3 eggs, 1/2 cup cold water, 1 tsp. Royal baking powder sifted into 1½ cups flour. Beat eggs and sugar together at least ten minutes, add water, then flour.
— Mrs. I. Tunison
A plain water sponge of the kind church-society books collected by the dozen: no butter, no milk, and no instructions beyond the mixing. Everything that matters here is in the beating.
- The hinge is the egg foamWith no fat and no leavening beyond one teaspoon of baking powder, the cake rises on air whipped into the eggs and sugar. Ten minutes by hand is not an exaggeration; in a stand mixer, 5 to 6 minutes on high gets you to the pale, thick ribbon stage where the batter falls from the beater in a slowly dissolving band.
- Fold, do not beat, the flourThe original says only "then flour." Sift it over the foam in two or three additions and fold with a spatula until just combined. Stirring it in will knock out the air you spent ten minutes building.
- Oven and panNo temperature or vessel is given. 350F in an ungreased 9-inch tube pan, or a greased and papered 8-inch square, for roughly 30 to 35 minutes. It is done when the top springs back and the cake is pulling from the sides.
- Royal baking powderA brand endorsement, common in books of this period. Royal was a cream-of-tartar powder, single-acting; any modern double-acting baking powder works at the same one teaspoon, and will simply hold a little more lift in reserve for the oven.
- FlourTurn-of-the-century household flour was often softer than today's all-purpose, though it varied by region and mill. Cake flour gives a closer match and a finer crumb; all-purpose works, measured by spooning into the cup and levelling rather than scooping.
- Missing salt and flavourThere is neither, which is typical of the genre and reads flat now. A pinch of salt with the flour and a teaspoon of vanilla or the grated zest of a lemon added with the water are in keeping with the style.
- CoolingFat-free sponges collapse if left in the pan. Invert immediately and let it cool upside down before turning out.
- YieldAbout 8 servings. Serve plain, with fruit, or split and filled with whipped cream; it is too lean to carry a heavy frosting well.
Water sponges like this one turn up regularly in American church and lodge cookbooks in the decades either side of 1900: cheap, made from pantry staples, and needing no butter at a time when butter was the expensive item on the list. This book comes out of the Philathea movement, the young women's Bible-class organisation that ran alongside the men's Baraca classes and is generally traced to Baptist Sunday-school work in Syracuse, New York, in the 1890s; local classes raised funds by collecting members' recipes and selling the printed result, which is why each entry carries a name. The specific call for "Royal baking powder" reflects both brand loyalty and the aggressive cookbook-and-pamphlet advertising the baking powder companies ran in this period, when cream-of-tartar powders and the newer alum-phosphate ones were competing hard for exactly this kind of home baker.