Chocolate Sponge Cake

A sponge cake is quite technical. You need to whip the eggs and sugar till a certain stage and then slowly and carefully fold in the flour. I recommend using a stand mixer for this cake. Do not over bake, it will dry the cake. Once the cake is baked, treat it just like a regular cake and go ahead with your freezing, trimming and frosting steps.

Ingredients:

(Stand mixer recommended recipe)

• Eggs - 4, large
• Salt – a pinch 
• Sugar – ¾ cup 
• All Purpose Flour – ¾ cup
• Cocoa Powder – ¼ cup
• Baking Powder - 1 ½ teaspoons 
• Butter - 2 tablespoons, unsalted

Let’s do some preparations first:

• Half an hour prior baking the cake, take out the Eggs from the fridge and keep them on your kitchen counter. We are doing this to bring them to the room temperature. This will help them to mix evenly with the other ingredients. 
• I recently got two 6 inches round baking pans. Yay! Debarshi gave them to me as an early birthday present. This recipe works perfectly for those cute small baking pans. 

• Let’s cut the Parchment Paper. Place the Pan on the Parchment paper and draw a circle on the outer edge of the pan.

• Spray the pans with nonstick spray. Line the bottoms with parchment paper cut into a circle to fit the pan. 

• Spray the parchment paper with nonstick spray and set aside. 
• Gather your ingredients and measure them before starting. 
• Sift the All Purpose Flour, Cocoa Powder and Baking Powder. 

Tip: 

• This cake asks for quite a few ¾ measurements. So how much is ¾? To put it simply, ¾ means ¼ * 3 or three times of ¼. Now this ¼ can be a measurement of cup or teaspoon and you got to measure it three times to get ¾ of the amount.

• Place the butter in a microwave safe dish and heat it for 1 to 1 ½ minutes so that the butter melts.
• Place the eggs into a bowl of the mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Add the Salt.

• Turn the mixer and start whipping them.

• See how the eggs are getting foamy. Remember the speed of the mixer will increase or decrease the time of the result.

• When the eggs are slightly foamy, without stopping the mixer start pouring the sugar slowly into the eggs. 

• Continue whipping the eggs and sugar for about 10-15 minutes until the mixture is pale yellow and drastically increased in volume. (Tip: Increase the speed to the highest otherwise you will be doing it all day) 

• When you lift the whisk from the mixture the ribbon should not disappear right away. Not whipping the egg mixture long enough will yield a dense cake.

• See the above photo? We need to mix it more; the ribbon is disappearing straight away.

• Almost there.

• Just a little bit more. When you will do it, it will be easier for you to judge how much longer you need to mix.

• Finally, success! When you reach this stage when the ribbon is not disappearing straight away you are ready to proceed to the next step.
• Preheat the oven to 350F.
• Combine the sifted flour mixture. 

• Now add half of the flour mixture into the egg mixture and carefully fold the dry ingredients until almost no streaks of flour are seen. (Tip: To fold, use a large spoon or spatula and go under the batter, then bring it over as you invert the spoon to pour the batter on top). 

• Add the other half of the flour mixture and keep folding just until no streaks of flour are seen. Do not over mix or the cake will be dense.

• Add the melted Butter. Continue carefully folding until all butter is incorporated. Do not over mix.
• Pour the batter into the baking pans and shake the pan in a circular motion back and forth couple of times to even out the batter.

• Bake on the middle rack for about 20-23 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Do not open the oven door sooner than 15 minutes into the baking process. Shut the oven door slowly so as not to disturb the rise of the cake.
• Once the cake is baked, remove it from the oven and transfer to a cooling rack and allow to sit inside the pan for 5- 10 minutes before removing it.

• Freeze the layers so that the cake doesn’t crumble when you trim it. Refer to my article on Bake the Cake to know how you can freeze and trim the cake layers.

Once you are done trimming, you can freeze the layers again. Now let’s make our Salted Caramel Buttercream.

Recommended Reading:

• Remember the characteristics of a good quality Cake
• Basic Kitchen Measurements
• Bake the Cake
• Chocolate Sponge Cake with Salted Caramel Buttercream (decorated with shaved chocolate and Chocolate Whipped Cream Frosting)
• Salted Caramel Buttercream
• Shave Chocolate with a Peeler
• Assemble a Piping / Pastry / Decorating Bag
• Chocolate Whipped Cream Frosting