Sponge Cup Cake
Two eggs well beaten, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, pinch of salt, 1 tsp. Royal baking powder, lastly, 1/2 cup hot milk; flavoring if you wish. This makes one dozen cakes.
— Mrs. A. H. Buckley
Mrs. Svenson's Sponge Cake 3 eggs (separated). Beat yolks 5 minutes with 1 cup sugar. Add 3 tbsp. cold water. Pinch salt. 1 small cup sifted flour, 1 small tsp. Royal baking powder with flour, 1½ tbsp. cornstarch. Beat all five more minutes. Fold in beaten whites last. Bake from 30-40 minutes in moderate oven.
— Inez B. Curtis
Two contributors' sponge cakes printed as one entry: a quick hot-milk cup cake and a longer-beaten separated-egg sponge. Neither gives a temperature for the first, and both rely on beating time rather than visual cues.
- The hot milk is the pointIn the first recipe the 1/2 cup of milk goes in hot and last, after the flour. Hot milk thins the batter and is characteristic of the hot-milk sponge; adding it cold, or before the flour, would likely give a denser cake.
- Oven for the cup cakesNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F for 15 to 20 minutes for a dozen cupcake-sized cakes, until the tops spring back.
- "Moderate oven"For Mrs. Svenson's cake, 350F. Thirty to forty minutes suits a tube pan or an 8-inch square; in a shallower pan check at 25 minutes.
- Royal baking powderRoyal was a cream-of-tartar (tartrate) type baking powder, named here by brand. Any modern double-acting baking powder works at the same measure.
- "1 small cup" and "1 small tsp."Genuinely imprecise. Read the small cup as a scant cup of sifted flour, roughly 3 1/2 oz, and the small teaspoon as a level rather than heaped one.
- Beating timesFive minutes of yolks with sugar, then five more after the flour, assumes hand beating or a slow mixer. On a stand mixer at medium-high, three minutes for the yolks and one to two after the dry ingredients is enough; the yolks should be pale and ribbon thickly off the beater.
- Folding the whitesBoth the cornstarch and the flour are already in when the whites go in, so fold with a spatula in as few strokes as will incorporate them. Overworking here is the usual reason this style of cake comes out shallow and tough.
- YieldThe first recipe states one dozen cakes. The second gives no yield; the quantities suggest roughly one 8- or 9-inch layer or a small tube cake.
Sponge cakes leavened largely by beaten egg were among the plainest respectable cakes a household could produce, needing no butter, and hot-milk sponge cakes of this kind appear frequently in American community cookbooks in the first half of the twentieth century. Both recipes here specify Royal baking powder by name, a sign that branded chemical leaveners were well established by the time this book was collected; the second recipe also keeps the long beating and the separated whites. The cornstarch in Mrs. Svenson's cake softens the crumb and is often suggested as a stand-in for cake flour. The second recipe carries one woman's name but another contributor's signature, a pattern often seen in church and society cookbooks.