Sponge cake

About sponge cake
Sponge cake is a cake based on flour (usually wheat flour), sugar, and eggs, sometimes leavened with baking powder, that derives its structure from an egg foam into which the other ingredients are folded. In addition to being eaten on its own, it lends itself to incorporation in a vast variety of recipes in which pre-made sponge cake serves as the base. The sponge cake is thought to be one of the first of the non-yeasted cakes, and the earliest recorded sponge cake recipe in English is attested to the 1615 book of English poet and author Gervase Markham entitled; The English Huswife, Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman. 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, indicating that sponge cakes had been established at 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" and the possibly ancestral Italian/Sephardic Jewish pan di Spagna ("Spanish bread", from the Ladino pan d'España, transferred to the Greek as pandespáni). Derivatives of the basic sponge cake idea include the American chiffon cake and the Latin American Tres leches cake.