My Orangey Twist on a Classic Sponge Cake Recipe
Sponge
cakes, also known as “Swiss Rolls,” are among the oldest baked sweet goodies in
Western Cuisine. One classic sponge cake
from Portugal, outside of Lisbon, called the “Pão
de Ló,” was featured a while ago on Christopher Kimball’s “Milk Street Radio”
program and recipe website. I’d never
baked a sponge cake and since the recipe for this version of it was pretty
straightforward and doable, I decided to give it a try. I was not disappointed.
Unlike most
cakes, Portuguese sponge cake doesn’t have any butter. Its oil/fat consists of a bit of extra virgin
olive oil. Besides the dry ingredients,
the cake consists mainly of eggs. When
baked right, this simple, eggy cake features a sweet center, bordering on being
gooey, below its upper crust in the center.
When recreating this cake after encountering it Portugal, Kimball and
his associates added an uncommon twist from Nuno Mendes, author of the book, MY
LISBON, who puts in a quarter cup of olive oil to the sponge cake batter. This is meant to give the cake some
understated fruity notes. I decided to
kick things up yet another notch by adding a bit of freshly squeezed orange
juice and orange zest into the mix. This
gave the cake a fantastic orange flavor, a nice orangey twist on a classic
Portuguese sponge cake!
Freshly
whipped crem and strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, or black berries (or
some or all mixed together) make a great pairing with this cake. The cake can also be enjoyed on by itself,
with a nice cup of tea—my choice here would be Chinese Pŭ’ĕr tea (普洱茶), whose wonderful woodsy flavor
makes a nice counterpoint to the sweetness of the cake. Good coffee, of course, does the trick
too. You could do a lot worse than
beginning a lazy weekend day with a slice or two of this cake with good coffee
or tea.
Ok, here are
the directions for making the sponge cake.
Ingredients:
1 cup of cake or regular flour (the latter will do just fine)
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/8 of teaspoon plain table or kosher salt
4 large eggs, plus 4 large egg yolks
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
1 cup of sugar
¼ cup of extra-virgin olive oil
1 table spoon of freshly squeezed orange juice
Orange zest (you don’t need much here, maybe take the zest
off half of the orange; extracting it with your trusty zester can be tiresome)
Baking steps:
[1]. Heat the oven to 375 degrees and put a rack
in its middle position. Douse a 9-inch
springform pan with cooking spray. The
Milk Street recipe calls for lining the pan with parchment paper, but I didn’t
do that and the cake came out easily and intact from the pan after baking.
[2]. In a bowl, mix the flour, salt and baking
powder together.
[3]. The other batter ingredients can be mixed in
a stand mixer with a whisk attachment or, as I did, lacking such equipment, in
a bowl with a hand electric mixer/beater.
First beat the whole eggs, egg yolks, orange juice, and vanilla until
they are frothy; I guess this is why sponge cakes are often called “foam”
cakes. This step should take 2
minutes. Then gradually add the sugar,
increasing your beater speed from medium to high and beat the changed mix until
it is very thick, pale, and tripled in volume.
[3]. Change the mixer/beater speed to medium low
and add the dry flour mix, 1 spoonful at a time, then incorporate the orange
zest. Once the egg-sugar-vanilla-orange
juice mix and dry ingredients and orange zest have been combined, drizzle or
slowly add in the extra virgin olive into the batter. Do that by folding the oil with a metal
spatula into the batter until it is homogenous.
The completed batter should be light, airy, and pourable.
[4]. Pour the batter into the prepared springform
cake pan and bake until the cake is browned on the top for 22 to 25 minutes for
a dark-colored pan, 30 to 33 minutes for light colored pan. You will know the cake is done when a
toothpick inserted 2 inches from the edge of the pan comes out clean—as noted
earlier, the center should have a borderline gooey layer in the cake interior
beneath the browned top. Although the
Milk Street recipe called for cooling the cake in the pan on a rack for about
an hour, until it’s barely warm, I went ahead and removed it from the pan
shortly after taking it out of the oven.
The cake popped cleanly right out of the pan. You can make sure that this happens by
running a knife around the edges of the springform pan to prevent the cake from
sticking to its sides.
According to
Kimball and company, the cake should deflate a bit in the center as it cools,
with the top having creases and wrinkles.
As the photo below shows, my sponge cake had the second characteristic,
while lacking the first.
This cake
lived up to my high expectations. I
loved its rich, moist texture stemming from all the eggs that went into the
batter. As I expected, the orange juice
and zest really enhanced an already tasty cake, giving it a further sweet
orangey flavor. Best of all, this simple
cake was a breeze to make. Prepping the
pan and putting the batter together took me around 20 minutes. Adding the 25 minutes it took to bake the
cake, the total time needed to make it amounted to just 45 minutes. This is going to be one of my go-to cakes
when I need to quickly whip up a dessert for a dinner party or something sweet
for guests coming over for morning or afternoon coffee or tea.
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