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Sponge Jelly Cake
Mrs. R. J. Belford.
Three eggs, one cup sugar, one cup flour, two teaspoonsful Cook's Friend baking powder, five tablespoons boiling water. This is quickly made. and you may use any filling you choose.
A hot-water sponge, stripped to the barest possible instruction: five ingredients and no method at all. The steps below fill in what the original assumes every cook already knew.
- The hinge: beat the eggs long and hardWith no butter and no liquid but the boiling water, the entire rise depends on air beaten into whole eggs and sugar. Beat until the mixture is pale, tripled, and falls from the beater in a ribbon that holds a moment on the surface — five to eight minutes with an electric mixer, considerably longer by hand.
- What the boiling water doesStir it in at the very end, after the flour, and fold rather than beat. The hot water thins the batter so it levels itself and helps set the crumb, but stirring vigorously at that stage knocks out the air you just spent eight minutes building.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian baking powder brand; any modern double-acting baking powder works. Two teaspoons to one cup of flour is on the generous side by current standards; a scant two teaspoons is closer to modern practice.
- Cup and spoon sizesNineteenth-century North American cups are usually close to the modern 8 fl oz cup, though sizes varied. On that basis one cup sugar is about 200 g and one cup flour about 115-125 g, depending on whether it is sifted before measuring.
- OvenThe recipe gives none. Bake at around 350°F. A sponge this lean is done when the top springs back and the edges just begin to pull from the pan — roughly 15 to 25 minutes in two 8-inch layers, 12 to 15 minutes in a sheet.
- "Jelly cake" means layers, not a rollIn nineteenth-century usage a jelly cake is generally thin rounds stacked with filling between them, not a rolled log. Two 8-inch layers or three thinner ones is the usual reading. Grease and line the bottoms; a fat-free sponge sticks.
- Filling"Any filling you choose" could mean jelly, jam, lemon curd or a boiled custard. A whipped cream filling will soften the cake within a few hours, so fill it close to serving.
- YieldTwo 8-inch layers, serving eight. The cake stales quickly — it has no fat to keep it — and is best eaten the day it is made.
The hot-water sponge was a common form in late-nineteenth-century North American home baking: no butter, no separated eggs, no long creaming. Its appearance in The Home Cook Book — compiled in Toronto in the 1870s from contributions by named local women, and one of the earliest Canadian community cookbooks — is typical of the genre, where recipes are shorthand notes giving proportions rather than method. Cook's Friend was a Canadian baking powder brand, and its inclusion by name is a reminder that the powders on the market varied considerably in strength and in what else they contained. Mrs. Belford's closing line, "this is quickly made," is the whole point of the recipe.