Sponge cake

I never considered making a sponge cake. It seemed like a lot of work to go through for not much bang. However, when I was growing up, it seemed like sponge cake (and its next-of-kind angel food and jelly roll) were the burden of all Jewish women. You baked a sponge cake for any occasion. Jelly rolls, infinitely more harrowing to assemble, were for serious illness, or post-funeral.

I couldn't put my hands on my mother's recipe, and my Passover cookbook had some ridiculous ground walnut cake instead of sponge cake. That's like leaving the mac and cheese out of The Joy of Cooking. Who needs books? I googled, and this one sounded right.
Sponge cake
and it was fine.

The hard part was that I'd bought matzo meal instead of matzo cake meal. I pulverized it in the Cuisinart until it looked fine enough. Here's the batter:



I also was short on lemon juice so I added some Caravella orangecello originale. I would have used limoncello, but I was out of that too. Against my better judgment I substituted 1 cup of Splenda for one of the two cups of sugar. We'll see tomorrow if that makes a difference in taste.

The recipe does not tell you that after you beat the egg yolks, and before you beat the egg whites, you have to wash the beaters. I've known since I could crawl that egg whites won't beat properly if there's a drop of fat in them (or so I was told), but I wonder if the average about.com reader is aware of this. Just one of the many dangers of getting recipes off the web. You also have to cool it by turning it upside down IMMEDIATELY. Within a minute of removing it from the oven, it will sink like a souffle in a cold draft if it's not upside down. My mother always used a soda bottle. I used what was handy, a Beaujolais-Villages.



It takes forever to cool, and then you have to saw it out of the aluminum tube pan with a thin knife. My mother had at least two of these tube pans, and there is one still in her apartment, which I will take home. You never know who will need a battered tube cake pan.



Tomorrow I will make one to ship to my niece in California. She has a thing for sponge cake, apparently, and my mother used to send her one every year.