Skip to main content
Dessert

To Make Small Sponge-cakes

Small sponge cakes made from eggs, flour, sugar, and flavouring, baked quickly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Isabella Beeton · From a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg) · 1 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Make Small Sponge-cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Let the flour be perfectly dry, and the sugar well pounded and sifted.

  2. Separate the whites from the yolks of the eggs, and beat the yolks with the sugar.

Make the batter

  1. Whisk the whites until they become rather stiff, and mix them with the yolks, but do not stir them more than is just necessary to mingle the ingredients well together.

  2. Dredge in the flour by degrees, then add the flavouring.

  3. Batter the tins well, then pour in the batter.

Bake and finish

  1. Sift a little sugar over the cakes.

  2. Bake them in a quick oven, but do not allow them to take too much colour, as they should be rather pale.

  3. Remove them from the tins before they get cold, and turn them on their faces, where let them remain until quite cold.

  4. Store them away in a closed tin canister or wide-mouthed glass bottle.

Nutrition, whole recipe (rough)

533Calories
19 gProtein
6 gFat
96 gCarbs
What these numbers assume: 2 portions
IngredientPortion assumedkcal
Flour1 cup (125g) all-purpose455
Egg1 large egg (50g)78

One typical portion per ingredient; the recipe's quantities are not counted. A rough guide only, not for medical or dietary planning.

By Isabella Beeton. Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures. See the original page.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whisked whites trap air and give the sponge its light, airy structure.
Flour
Sets during baking to give the cakes their firm, sponge-like structure.
Sugar (in the method)
Sweetens the cakes and helps the yolks form a smooth, stable base for the batter.

The step that matters

Folding in the whites. Whites should be whisked stiff but mixed in gently, with as little stirring as possible. Overmixing knocks out the trapped air, so the cakes bake up flat and dense instead of light.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes