My Granny's Sponge Cake

With a Passover Tweak

Granny’s Sponge Cake. Light and airy and citrussy. A Passover version is here, too!

Granny’s Sponge Cake

My Iraqi Granny made the most incredibly light sponge cakes. How did she do it?She whipped the whites into billowy clouds in a large platter with a fork and carefully incorporated them into the yolks. Of all the many things Granny baked, it’s her sponge cakes that I remember most. This happened in Shanghai, where my father, mother, brother, and I lived with Granny in a one-room apartment during world War II.

I’ve tweaked Granny’s recipe just a bit to include jolts of orange and lemon zest.

The orange looks like an orange. But the lemons! the one on the left is green, but it’s a lemon. The fruit ac ross from it is also a lemon, a homegrown one. When I shop for them at farmers markets, I always ask “which are the lemons?”

Here’s the zesting setup. I use a microplane to remove the zest, the outermost layer of the peel.

I put the zest into a cup with some of the sugar and work them together with my fingers.

Smushing the finely grated zest with some granulated sugar extracts as much of the natural oils as possible, giving the cake its special taste. (To make this cake for Passover, please see the NOTE at the end of the recipe).