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Hot Water Sponge Cake
Yolks 2 eggs 1 cup sugar ⅜ cup hot water or milk ¼ teaspoon lemon extract Whites two eggs 1 cup flour 1½ teaspoons baking powder 1/4 teaspoon salt Beat yolks of eggs until thick and lemon-colored, add one-half the sugar gradually, and continue beating; then add water, remaining sugar, lemon extract, whites of eggs beaten until stiff, and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder and salt. Bake twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven in a buttered and floured shallow pan.
A small, one-bowl hot-water sponge that leans on baking powder rather than on beaten eggs alone. The ingredient list has come through the scanner with its fractions mangled, so read it with care before you start.
- The fractionsThe printed page gives ⅜ cup hot water or milk and ¼ teaspoon lemon extract, and our text now matches it. Those proportions work as written.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Twenty-five minutes suits a shallow pan of about 8 inches, square or round; the cake is done when the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- Why hot liquidThe hot water or milk loosens the batter, so the flour can be folded in with minimal stirring. Add it in a thin stream so the eggs do not set at the edges.
- Order of operationsEverything after the hot liquid is folded, not beaten. Whites first, flour last, and stop the moment no dry streaks remain — this batter has no fat to protect it from over-mixing.
- Beating the yolks"Thick and lemon-colored" means three to five minutes with an electric mixer, until the yolks fall from the beater in a ribbon that holds a second on the surface.
- Pan preparationThe recipe says buttered and floured, and that is what it means. If you prefer, butter and flour the base only, or line it with parchment.
- Lemon extractPeriod lemon extracts were usually lemon oil in alcohol and their strength varied a good deal. A modern quarter teaspoon is mild; finely grated zest of half a lemon may give a closer result.
- YieldA thin cake in a pan of about 8 inches, serving six to eight. Like most fat-free sponges it stales quickly, and it suits fruit, stewed compote or whipped cream.
Hot-water sponge belongs to a family of late nineteenth-century American cakes in which a splash of boiling liquid is added to a lean batter. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School book, first issued in 1896, is full of such small, precisely measured cakes; her contribution to the period was less any single recipe than the popularising of level measurements — a practice other writers had used before her — which is why a formula this brief can be followed at all. The cake sits in the same tradition as the later hot-milk sponge and, further along, the boiling-water chocolate cakes of the twentieth century. Sponge cakes of this type are quick to assemble, baked in a shallow pan, and served plain with preserves or fruit.