I had to try a lot of times cooking sponge cakes with different recipes, before reaching a truly satisfactory result. So here's the tips I followed to cook it.
Ingredients (24/26 cm cake mold)
- 4 eggs
- 135 g of 00 flour
- 120 g of sugar
- 25 g of corn starch
- 4 tablespoons of hot water
- A pinch of salt
- Organic lemon zest
Directions
- Divide the egg yolks from the whites. Put the yolks in a bowl together with the sugar and grated lemon zest. Whisk and, after a minute, add the 4 tablespoons of hot water.
- Continue to whisk for other 15 minutes so that the mixture becomes clear and swollen with air as much as possible.
- In another bowl beat the egg whites until stiff.
- Sift the flour with the starch and the pinch of salt.
- Transfer the foamy mixture of egg yolks in a large bowl and gently, with movements from bottom to top, incorporate half of the sifted flour and half of the whipped egg whites, then add the remaining flour and egg whites always taking care not to deflate the mixture. It is important to know that the sponge cake does not contain yeast and swells cooking just thanks to the air contained in it, especially due to the mounted eggs. For this reason, it is important to be careful when you mix it and try to get a homogeneous mixture, but at the same time as "foamy" as possible.
- Pour everything in a buttered and floured cake mold and bake in a static oven at 175 Celsius degrees for half an hour. Don't open the oven until the sponge cake is almost cooked, then check the consistency with a toothpick. It is cooked if the toothpick is dry when extracted.
- Let the sponge cake cool in the oven for about ten minutes and then pull it out to make it cool completely.
How to cut the sponge cake
Usually it is necessary to cut the sponge cake in the middle in order to add some filling. It is possible to cut it with an appropriate knife. However I found out that it's easier to obtain a good result using a cotton or nylon floss.
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