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Cream Sponge Cake
3 eggs, beaten separately 1½ cups sugar 1 1/2 cups flour Pinch of salt 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1/2 cup boiling water 1 teaspoon vanilla Mix in order given, sifting flour, salt, and baking powder together. Beat well. Bake in layers and fill with following: 1 cup milk 1 tablespoon butter 1 egg-yolk, well beaten Pinch of salt 2 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon vanilla Mix flour and sugar with two tablespoons of milk, add yolk and beat well. Boil rest of milk and butter, and add to this first mixture, stirring constantly.
A hot-water sponge — the boiling water gives a very light, slightly moist crumb — layered with a simple flour-thickened pastry cream. Two things in the original need attention: an ambiguous flour quantity and a filling that is not actually finished as written.
- On the flourThe printed page gives 1 1/2 cups flour, as our text now reads. Against 1 1/2 cups sugar and three eggs that yields a tender, fragile layer; if you want one that handles the filling without tearing, go up to about 1 3/4 cups.
- Finish the filling on the heatAs printed, the boiled milk is stirred into the flour-sugar-yolk paste and left there. That will not set. Return the combined mixture to the saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring, until it thickens and just bubbles, about a minute past the first boil, which also cooks out the raw flour taste and brings the yolk to a safe temperature. Add the vanilla off the heat and chill before spreading.
- Oven and pansThe original gives no oven temperature; 350F suits this batter. Two 8- or 9-inch layers take roughly 22 to 28 minutes; three thinner layers, 15 to 18. The cake is done when it springs back and the edges just pull from the pan.
- Calumet Baking PowderA double-acting brand still sold in the US. Any modern double-acting baking powder works at the same 2 level teaspoons. If yours is single-acting or elderly, test it in hot water first.
- "Beaten separately"Beat the yolks with the sugar until pale, and the whites to soft peaks, folding them in near the end. The original does not spell out the folding; do not stir the whites down.
- Order of the boiling waterAdd the 1/2 cup boiling water after the dry ingredients, as the list has it (the vanilla follows), and fold rather than beat it in; hitting the batter with boiling water while beating hard will knock out the air the eggs provided.
- YieldOne 8- or 9-inch two-layer cake, 8 to 10 servings. The filling makes about a cup, enough for a single generous layer of filling and nothing left over for the top; the original says nothing about finishing the outside, and a dusting of powdered sugar is one option.
- StorageA milk-and-yolk filling is perishable. Keep the assembled cake refrigerated and eat it within two days; the sponge dries quickly after that.
Reliable Recipes was one of a long line of booklets published by baking powder companies — here Calumet, founded in Chicago in the 1880s and later absorbed into General Foods — and the brand name written into the ingredient list is the whole point of the book. Such pamphlets were given away free or sent for a coupon, and they trained a generation of American home bakers on chemically leavened cakes at a moment when the older egg-and-arm-power sponge was giving way to something quicker. This particular formula sits on the boundary: it still calls for eggs beaten separately, as a true sponge does, but hedges with two teaspoons of baking powder. The half cup of boiling water marks it as one of the "hot water" sponges that circulated widely in early twentieth-century American cookbooks, and the filling is a plain boiled custard of the sort usually labelled cream filling — the same thing that makes a Boston cream pie, minus the chocolate on top.