Category: Desserts

Old-Fashioned Sponge Cake

Sundays were special when I was a kid. Sunday was the one day in the week when the whole family could spend the whole day together. When I was very young my father’s work week ended at noon on Saturday, so we had Saturday afternoons free for fishing, berry picking or visiting. But a lot of the time, those afternoons were devoted to “chores,” a euphemism for hoeing the garden, mowing the lawn, cutting and splitting firewood, and other such unpleasant activities.

Sundays, however, were mostly set aside for fun activities with an intermission for the church service after Sunday dinner. We lived about two miles from Trinity Lutheran Church near the tiny village of Phipps, Wisconsin, where my father had been baptized and confirmed, and we went nearly every Sunday. It was a small country church, one of three served by a minister who conducted the first service of the day in Glidden, Wisconsin, drove forty miles to Cable where he led midmorning worship at the log chapel where my Aunt Hilda was married and then drove another sixteen miles for the service at our church.

Besides this challenging Sunday schedule, he also taught catechism classes, visited homebound members of the congregations, buried and married folks and met with church elders. He was a busy man.

Winter storms sometimes forced cancellations of services at Cable and Phipps, but the church in Glidden had enough people living within easy walking distance that services were conducted every Sunday, even on the opening weekend of deer season. Church was cancelled at Cable and Phipps when the men and boys set off in search of the wily whitetail. In the days before the two car family, hunters had first dibs on the family vehicle, so non-hunters and children had no way to drive to church.

Except for that one Sunday a year, church was an integral part of a day that began with Dad’s driving to town to buy a Sunday paper. Since he didn’t have to go to work and there was no school bus for us kids to watch for, Sunday breakfasts tended to be relatively leisurely affairs. About once a month, they featured orange juice. The exact timing depended on sales at the two local grocery stores. When oranges were on sale, Mom bought a bag, and we had orange juice.

People like great Aunt Hattie, who lived in California, wouldn’t have called it orange juice, because Mom added water to make sure that there was a glassful for everyone. One of my earliest memories is of washing oranges under the pitcher pump in the kitchen. Dad would cut the oranges in half, we would squeeze them on on the round juicer and Mom would add sugar and water until the juice tasted right to her. Then she would add the orange peel halves and give the mixture a good stir before serving glasses of what most people would call orangeade. We loved it.

Later, Mom would use the orange rinds to flavor things she baked—like orange sponge cake. Orange sponge cake recipes call for lots of eggs, which was no problem in the Rang household. Mom’s hens kept us well supplied.

Here is how to turn oranges and eggs into a wonderful cake.

INGREDIENTS:

6 large eggs
1 1/3 cups cake flour
1 1/2 cups sugar, divided
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 cup orange juice
1 T orange zest
3/4 tsp. cream of tartar

PROCEDURE:

Start by bringing the eggs to room temperature. Set them on the counter a couple of hours before you start the cake or put them in a bowl of warm water for a few minutes.

Wash and dry the oranges. Remove a generous tablespoon of zest from the oranges with a zester or kitchen grater and squeeze a half cup of juice from the fruit.

Preheat the oven to 325º and mix the flour and one-third cup of sugar in a small bowl.

Separate the eggs into two mixing bowls. With an egg beater or electric mixer beat the yolks until they are lemon colored and begin to thicken. Beat in the orange zest and juice and continue beating the yolks until they are very thick, gradually adding two-thirds cup of sugar and a quarter teaspoon of salt.

Transfer the flour and sugar mixture from the small bowl to a sifter and sift the dry ingredients very gradually on top of the yolk mixture. Use a spatula to fold the dry ingredients gently into the yolk mixture.

Wash the beaters thoroughly. Sprinkle three-fourths teaspoon of cream of tartar on the whites and beat them until soft peaks form. Continue beating while you add a half cup of sugar until stiff peaks form.

Fold the egg yolk mixture gently but thoroughly into the beaten egg whites and put the batter into an ungreased ten-inch tube (angel food) cake pan. Run a table knife carefully through the batter to remove any bubbles.

Bake on the center shelf in the oven for thirty to forty minutes. Check for doneness at thirty minutes. If the top of the cake is dry and springs back when you press down gently on it, it is done. Take it from the oven and invert the pan until the cake is completely cool.

Run a table knife around the tube and inside the pan to remove the cake from the pan.

NOTES: If you don’t have cake flour in your kitchen, you can make do by using 1 1/3 cups minus 2 1/2 tablespoons all-purpose flour.

We balance the inverted pan on a bottle while the cake cools. Works great unless you jostle the pan.

This cake is delicious by itself, wonderful with ice cream and heavenly with whipped cream. Don’t think of spoiling it with “whipped topping.”

Mrs. Deckert’s Hawaiian Banana Bread

My mother’s recipe box has a lot of banana bread recipes in it. Since I like numbers and facts, I was going to count them today. However, I abandoned that project after looking at the third card in the box. It was a recipe for Hawaiian Banana Bread that had no pineapple, macadamia nuts or coconuts. I was intrigued. Why call it Hawaiian?

Mom’s note said “Patsy’s from Mrs. Deckert. Very good.” So I grabbed the cell phone and called my sister.

After telling her of my aborted banana bread counting project I asked, “Why do you call it Hawaiian?”

“That’s what Mrs. Deckert called it,” she said. “I don’t know why she did, but it’s our favorite banana bread. You should try it.”

She explained how she got the recipe. “When we were first married, we bought a house in Northwoods Beach south of Hayward. Mrs. Deckert lived across the road and next to the town hall across from our house. She was the nicest little old lady. She had a strong German accent and came over to welcome us when we moved in. She brought us a loaf of her Hawaiian Banana Bread. I asked for her recipe and later gave it to Mom. Mrs. Deckert used to bring us Kuchen too. It was delicious but I never got that recipe.”

Bananas do grow in Hawaii, so maybe that explains the name.

Too lazy to go back to my recipe counting project, I decided to see how many banana bread recipes would show up on a search of the Internet. The answer is, A LOT. Even more than recipes for zucchini bread, a notoriously prolific squash that frugal cooks desperately keep trying to use up every summer.

My Google search returned about 3,260,000 results for zucchini bread but over 7,750,000 for banana bread. If each banana bread recipe were written on a standard three by five-inch recipe card and laid end to end, you could mark the route all the way from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Rapid City, South Dakota with enough cards left over to guide you most of the way to Mount Rushmore.

The zucchini bread cards would run out at Sioux Falls.

This is another really easy recipe. Just cut the shortening into the dry ingredients before folding in the banana and eggs. No electric mixer and just a little stirring. Here is what you do.

INGREDIENTS:

1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
3 ripe bananas
2 large eggs

PROCEDURE:

Preheat the oven to 350º and mash enough bananas to fill a measuring cup. Grease and flour two bread loaf pans.

Sift the flour, sugar, salt and baking soda into a mixing bowl. With a pastry blender or table fork, cut the shortening into the dry ingredients until it looks like coarse corn meal. This is like the first step in making pie crust.

Beat the eggs in a small bowl until they are lemon-colored. Fold the mashed bananas and eggs into the flour mixture until everything is moist and put half of the batter into each pan.

Set the pans on the center shelf in the oven and bake for thirty to forty minutes. Check for doneness at thirty minutes. A toothpick inserted near the center of the bread should come out clean.

Remove the pans from the oven and let them stand for about six minutes to cool slightly. Then loosen the loaves and transfer them to a rack to finish cooling.

NOTES: Patsy says that you can bake this bread in one standard loaf pan if you want. Extend the baking time to an hour and test for doneness before taking it from the oven.

Frugal shoppers watch for discounted bananas at the supermarket. Produce managers often reduce the price on bananas starting to get brown streaks on the peel as they ripen. If you want bananas to peel and eat raw, buy ones with little or no brown on them, but if you want to make banana bread, pick ones that are turning brown or take yellow bananas home and let them ripen on the counter. They get sweeter and sweeter.

This recipe produces two five by nine-inch loaves a little more than an inch thick. Maybe because you cut the shortening into the dry ingredients, the bread is a bit darker than most banana breads, but it is delicate and flavorful.