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 Pŭĕr 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.  


Following Mendes, Kimball suggests drizzling the cake top with a bit more extra virgin olive oil along with a dusting of flaky sea salt.  One could also give it a sprinkling of confectioner’s sugar over the top of the cake.

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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