Sponge Cake with Only 3 Ingredients

Simple to follow and sure to impress. Just follow a few necessary steps to create a sponge cake that is soft and fluffy, just like a cloud.

Ingredients for the Sponge Cake:

Six eggs
450 grams of type 2 flour
400 grams of granulated sugar
various flavourings
butter for greasing the baking tray or baking paper

To fill the Sponge Cake, various fillings can be used. Among the most common in pastry are buttercream, chantilly cream, and pastry cream.

For the buttercream preparation:

175 grams of butter at room temperature
150 grams of granulated sugar
6 egg yolks
50 ml of water
1 vanilla pod (you can enhance the cream with dried or fresh fruit chopped into pieces, chocolate chips, or flavouring vials of chocolate, coffee, strawberry, lemon, or vanilla.

To make the chantilly cream:

250 ml of fresh liquid cream
50 grams of icing sugar
(optional) 1 vanilla pod, chocolate chips or wild strawberries

For the pastry cream:

6 egg yolks
140 grams of sugar
45 grams of cornstarch
400 ml of plant-based milk
1 vanilla pod
100 ml of plant-based cream

Soft and fragrant, the Sponge Cake is the king of elaborate Italian pastries. Making it is really very simple, but care must be taken to prepare it calmly and skillfully, to avoid it collapsing on itself. To prepare the Sponge Cake, first, you need to prepare the right baking tray. Depending on its size, you will choose the exact number of eggs to use. If the tray is 29 centimetres, about 9 eggs will be needed; if the tray is between 24-27 centimetres, about 6 will be required. The number of eggs is significant, as it determines the height of our Sponge Cake. But now, let’s see step by step how to make it.

First, separate the egg yolks from the whites and divide the 400 grams of sugar into three distinct parts. Beat the yolks with 2/3 of the sugar, about 250 grams, for at least 10 minutes. Try to maintain a steady and consistent rhythm: the mixture should be soft and frothy, smooth and without lumps. Gradually, start adding the sifted flour and mix gently but consistently, always in the same direction, from bottom to top. At this point, you need to whip the egg whites with the remaining granulated sugar and a pinch of salt. The mixture should remain quite soft and not overly solid, as we will need to pour it into the bowl with the eggs, sugar, and flour that have already been combined.

This is perhaps the most challenging moment in the preparation of the Sponge Cake. When combining the two mixtures, care must be taken not to deflate the eggs, otherwise, we might say goodbye to our cake. But nothing too difficult: just mix calmly, without too much force and always from bottom to top. Now, to give a more pronounced flavour to our Sponge Cake, we can add the flavourings we prefer: among the most popular in pastry are those of mandarin, orange blossom, vanilla, and rum. Then, of course, everything is left to personal taste. Nothing prevents us from adding decidedly more unusual food flavourings such as mint, blueberry, cedar, almond, hazelnut, and coffee.

Those who are already accustomed to making desserts will notice immediately: even while mixing the batter, its volume seems to double more and more. For an even more spectacular effect, before baking our Sponge Cake, we can add a packet of baking powder to the mixture to make it double in volume. At this point, you need to line a baking tray with baking paper or butter it up to the edge and set the oven to about 160° for a maximum of thirty minutes. Even though curiosity is high, during baking, you must never open the oven door to check on the cake: the risk of it collapsing is very high. Once cooled, the Sponge Cake can be cut in half and filled in any way we like. Creams, fresh fruit, and ganache will make the cake truly unmissable.