Sponge cake Puzzle 1.23

Sponge cake is a cake based on flour (usually wheat flour), sugar, and eggs, and is sometimes leavened with baking powder. It has a firm, yet well aerated structure, similar to a sea sponge. A sponge cake may be produced by the batter method or the foam method.

Cake made using the batter method is known as a butter or pound cake in the U.S., while in the U.K. it is known as Madeira cake or Victoria sponge cake. A cake made using the foam method is known as a sponge cake or, in the U.K., also as whisked sponge. These forms of cake are common in Europe, especially in French patisserie.

The sponge cake is thought to be one of the first of the non-yeasted cakes, and the earliest attested sponge cake recipe in English is found in the 1615 book of English poet and author Gervase Markham, The English Huswife, Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman.[1] Though it does not appear in Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery in the late 18th century, it is found in Lydia Maria Child's The American Frugal Housewife,[2] indicating that sponge cakes had been established in Grenada in the Caribbean, by the early 19th century.

Variations on the theme of a cake lifted, partially or wholly, by trapped air in the batter exist in most places where European patisserie has spread, including the French Génoise, the Portuguese pão-de-ló, the Anglo-Jewish "plava",[3] and the possibly ancestral Italian pan di Spagna ("Spanish bread").[4][5]

Derivatives of the basic sponge cake idea include the American chiffon cake and the Latin American Tres leches cake.