Vanilla sponge cake

The smell of a cake baking in the oven is a happy childhood memory for me. Here’s a simple Vanilla Sponge Cake recipe from my mother Jayasree Chakraborty, the lady behind those memories.

My mom didn’t exactly love the kitchen. That is to say she didn’t love the daily, mundane process of making dal, chawal, sabji and other regular stuff. What she loved was trying out new recipes, something she still does from time to time. Growing up, we were subjected to several of her experiments in the kitchen and though I say ‘subjected,’ the results were almost always wonderful. Most of ma’s experimentation was courtesy a cookbook by the noted Bengali author Leela Majumdar titled ‘Rannar Boi‘ or simply translated, A book of cooking. Apart from curries and cutlets, it also had a fairly extensive section on baking, with recipes for Griddle cakes, Crepe Suzette and Fruit Rolly Polly among others. I mention the book because it kindled a lifelong love for baking in ma, much to our delight. It is something she loves to indulge in whenever any of us ‘children’ visit home. I’m not sure if the Vanilla Sponge Cake recipe here was mentioned in the book as I do not have it handy anymore, nor does ma. But as she says, the inspiration surely comes from there.

Vanilla Sponge Cake

Ingredients

Flour: 2 cups

Baking powder: 1 tablespoon

Salt: 1/2 teaspoon

Vanilla paste/Vanilla Essence: Depending on taste; this recipe uses 5 gm Vanilla paste, available in food stores or get a Vanilla pod and scrape the seeds into the batter

Unsalted Butter: 1 cup, softened

Sugar: 1 1/2 cups

Eggs: 4

Buttermilk: 1 cup

Method

Preheat the oven to 250 degrees for 10 minutes. Grease a large cake tin and keep aside. If you are using a loaf tin like ma did, you will need two.

Sift together Flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl.

In another bowl, beat butter and vanilla paste until the butter is creamy and light. You can use an electric beater for this or do it manually with a balloon whisk. Add the sugar slowly, one cup at a time, beating in between. Next, add the eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition. Now stir in the buttermilk, followed by the flour, baking powder and salt mixture. Mix.

Pour the cake batter into the prepared cake tin. Drop the tin on the kitchen countertop gently to shake out any air bubbles and let the batter settle. Bake at 250 degrees for 20 minutes, reducing the heat to 225 degrees for the last 15 minutes or until a skewer or knife inserted into the cake comes out clean.

Turn out on a wire rack and let cool. Serve plain or drizzled with custard.

Tips: You can even add half a cup of oats to your cake batter for a little dose of health. Remember that temperatures vary from oven to oven, so check midway to see if you need to reduce the temperature or keep it as is. My mother used an OTG and varied the temperature in between as mentioned in the recipe.

If you cannot find Vanilla paste, do as ma did in the pre-speciality food store days. Simply mix a good dollop of vanilla essence in the cake batter.

— By Reshmi Chakraborty

Photographs: Silvertalkies