Sponge cake can seem like a challenge, especially for us living at high altitude, but wherever your abode, there isn’t much of a trick to it: use room temperature ingredients, incorporate enough air by beating the yolks and sugar together in a warm bowl and carefully fold in flour and stiff egg whites. Then bake it in a slow oven.
Bake it the French or American Way
Usually the sponge cake – biscuit de Savoie is baked in a tall mold, you know, the copper pans with the tin lining, the kind you might pick up at a flea market. But if you don’t have one of these pans, we Americans favor molds with the cylindrical hollow in the center: the bundt pan with fluted sides or the smooth, angled sides of an angel food cake pan. Both of these pans work ideally for baking a sponge cake.
Sponge Cake – Biscuit de Savoie
- 6 eggs, separated
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon lemon, orange or vanilla extract
- 2/3 cup sifted cake flour
- Butter and cane sugar for pan
Directions
- Preheat oven to 300℉. Butter a deep pan and sprinkle with sugar. (This coating will caramelize onto the cake as it cooks.)
- Warm your mixing bowl and add the egg yolks, sugar and extract. Beat this mixture for 5 minutes on medium-high speed. The mixture should be very light colored, fluffy and shiny. (I passed a kitchen torch around the outside of my metal mixing bowl several times during the 5-minute mixing to keep the bowl warm–not hot.)
- Place flour in a sieve and shake over the yolk mixture, cutting and folding it in with a spatula and combining before adding more.
- Beat egg whites on high speed until stiff. Cut and fold them into the batter. Fill cake pan, gently smooth out the surface to make it even and bake for 45 to 50 minutes. Test for doneness: the cake will be light brown and pulled away from the edges of the pan and a skewer inserted I the center will come out clean. You can also use the finger test to test for doneness: when pressed lightly with a finger a well-baked cake springs back.
- Remove from the oven and let cake sit in the pan for 10 minutes then invert it onto a baking rack to finish cooling.
- Serve it plain or with crème anglaise and a fruit sauce.
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