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White Butter Sponge Cake
The same as the preceding made with the surplus white of eggs often left over from salad making, etc. Use 1 pound of whites instead of the 10 eggs and add an ounce more butter.
It makes jelly cakes; may have raisins or currants mixed in, and if made cold enough to keep shape makes very fair sponge drops or other small cakes. It is the best also for the following.
Cream Cake or "Washington Pie".
Bake the butter sponge cake on jelly cake pans, quite thin, and place two sheets together with pastry cream thickly spread between. The pastry cream is the same that is used to fill cream puffs, which see or index.
This is a variation entry, so it only makes sense read against the butter sponge recipe it follows — the substitution here is whites for whole eggs plus a little extra butter. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- A pound of whitesEgg whites run about 1 oz each from a large egg, so 1 lb is roughly 15-16 whites, about 2 cups. Weigh them rather than counting; the whole point of the recipe is using up an accumulated jar of leftovers, which vary in size.
- The extra ounce of butterWhole eggs bring fat and emulsifying lecithin from the yolks. Note too that 1 lb of whites is rather more white than 10 whole eggs would give (about 10-11 oz), so this is not a straight exchange. The single added ounce of butter does not make up the missing yolk fat, and the result is likely to be a firmer, whiter, drier crumb than the whole-egg version.
- Jelly cake pansShallow round layer tins, of the sort used for thin cake layers; commonly 8 or 9 inches. Modern round cake pans work. The recipe asks only for 'quite thin' sheets.
- Oven heatThe recipe specifies no oven at all. Thin sheets in shallow pans bake fast, so watch them: pull them when the surface springs back and the edges just begin to shrink, since overbaked sponge tears when you spread cream on it.
- "Made cold enough to keep shape"Butter sponge batters of this type are worked warm so the butter stays fluid and the batter flows level in the pan. Cooled, the same batter stiffens enough to hold a piped mound, which is how it becomes sponge drops. This is the hinge of the whole entry: temperature, not any change of ingredients, decides whether you get sheets or drops.
- Pastry creamThe cream puff filling referred to is an egg-and-flour thickened custard. It must be cooked through to boiling to gelatinize the flour and cook out the raw taste, then chilled fully before it goes between the layers or it will soak and slide.
- Fruit additionsRaisins or currants should be tossed in a little of the recipe's flour first. An egg-white sponge has less structure to suspend them and they will otherwise sink to the base.
- YieldA batter built on 1 lb of whites is a large quantity by domestic standards, enough for several thin layers or a good many small drops. Halving it is reasonable for home use.
Washington pie belongs to a family of nineteenth-century New England layer cakes — thin sponge sheets sandwiched with jam or custard and given a president's name, a habit that also produced Washington cake and Martha Washington cake. It is the near relation of Boston cream pie, which is traditionally traced to the Parker House hotel in the 1850s; the older names "pie" and "cake" were used loosely for anything baked in a pie or jelly pan, which is why a cake with no pastry in it kept the word. What makes this particular entry worth noticing is thrift: it is written for whoever has egg whites left over from salad making, and it turns that surplus into three things — jelly cakes, small drops, and the filled cream cake — without a new formula.