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Mock Sponge Cake
3 eggs
1½ teaspoons baking-powder
1 cup sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup cold water
½ teaspoon vanilla
1½ cups flour
Beat the eggs, add the sugar and beat well. Add the water, alternating with the sifted dry ingredients, then the vanilla. Bake in an ungreased pan in a moderate oven (350° F.).
A hot-water sponge in miniature: no butter, no separated whites, and the whole thing leans on how much air you beat into the whole eggs. It is a fast cake, but the beating is not optional.
- Beat longer than feels necessaryWith no separated whites and no fat, the only leavening beyond the baking powder is the foam. Whole eggs and sugar should be beaten until pale, thick, and falling in a ribbon that sits on the surface for a second or two — five to eight minutes with an electric mixer, considerably longer by hand.
- Fold, do not stirOnce the flour and water go in, work gently and alternately as the recipe directs. Overworking at this stage knocks out the air you just spent several minutes creating.
- Ungreased pan is deliberateThe batter climbs the sides of the tin as it rises, and grease would keep it from gripping. Use a plain tube pan or an 8-inch square with an unlined, ungreased base; nonstick and silicone both defeat the purpose.
- The ovenThe book gives 350°F itself, at the lower end of the range period cookbooks called a "moderate oven." Expect 25 to 35 minutes for an 8-inch square, 35 to 40 for a tube pan, until the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- Cool upside downA fat-free sponge collapses under its own weight while warm. Invert the pan — on the tube's feet, or propped on cans — and leave it until fully cold before running a knife around the edge.
- FlourModern all-purpose flour is often stronger than the household flour of the period. Cake flour, or all-purpose with two tablespoons per cup swapped for cornstarch, gives a tenderer crumb closer to the intent.
- YieldRoughly an 8-inch square or a small tube cake; eight to ten servings. It is best on the day it is baked, and stales fast because there is no fat in it.
True sponge cake is leavened entirely by beaten eggs, and traditionally demanded a great many of them along with a long arm at the whisk — hence the appeal of a "mock" version, which stretches three eggs with baking powder and half a cup of water. The Butterick book belongs to the era when chemical leavening had become widely available to American cooks, and cookbooks were busily reworking labor-intensive classics around it. Water sponges of this type turn up under a run of names in early twentieth-century collections — hot water sponge, mock sponge — and their appeal was that they used no butter at all, which mattered both to the household budget and, in the years around the First World War, to the periodic campaigns urging Americans to save fat. The absence of butter is also why the cake must be baked in an ungreased pan and cooled inverted: with nothing to enrich the crumb, the structure depends wholly on egg foam clinging to the tin.