Simple Yellow Cake

Simple Yellow Cake is a recent addition to my collection of one-bowl cake recipes. The recipe comes from Laurie Colwin’s beloved More Home Cooking, specifically, the essay “Four Easy Pieces.”

Unrelated peach picture.

For years I read this recipe, which Colwin describes as a “classic, basic sponge cake English women of a certain age can bake in their sleep,” but never attempted it. My avoidance of simple yellow cake, tea cake, or genoise, (it lacks a precise name) wasn’t due to nationality. I was afraid to bake this cake because the recipe, at least in my edition, fails to give an oven temperature. Until recently, I lacked both the experience and the confidence to realize 350F/180C would work.

—

Into the kitchen.

Simple Yellow Cake is absurdly easy to as cakes go: mix four ingredients, pour them into a baking pan, bake. Voila: cake. No mixer necessary.

Three of the four ingredients.

Some of you may wish to use a mixer to make your simple yellow cake. Please feel free. Fond as I am of my Kitchenaid, I’ll stick to my bowl and whisk here. Recipes calling for mixers connote occasions, which also connote time to bake–and wash up. One-bowl cakes connote daily life, which is generally rushed, pressed, or otherwise less than ideal when it comes to baking. Or washing mixing bowls and beaters. Lacking a photo illustration of daily life’s stressors, I instead offer some butter.

About baking pans: Colwin baked her cake in a 7-inch/17 cm pan, but said the cake fared equally well in an 8-inch/20cm square pan. I baked mine in an 8-inch/20cm round pan.

I then tried baking the cake my trusty Pyrex 9-inch/22cm glass pie plate. Both pans worked, but if you want to turn the cake out, I suggest using a metal cake pan.

The recipe calls for two eggs. When Colwin was writing, eggs were villified as cholesterol carriers. Recent science has lessened our concerns regarding the egg/cholesterol connection. This said, if you want to use one egg yolk and two whites in this cake, it won’t be quite as yellow, but it will still be delicious.

The original recipe uses only a half cup of sugar. Even I–somebody who considers most desserts overly sweet–find this austere. Recalling Dorie Greenspan’s Swedish Visiting Cake recipe,* I increased the sugar to a scant cup.

(Swedish Visting Cake calls for one cup each flour and sugar)

We have arrived at the moment of mixing. Colwin gives readers the option of adding a 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder to the cake. If you, like me, are mixing the batter by hand, it is wise to add the baking powder. If you are using handheld electric beaters or a mixer, the baking powder isn’t necessary.

This brings me to mixing techniques. Simple Yellow Cake is a butter cake. Most butter cakes begin by blending sweet butter with sugar in mixers, as this achieves the best aeration. But this being a simple cake, you can use a wooden spoon, a whisk, or your clean hands.

Stay with me here.

Mixing ingredients by hand is not some barbaric practice; profesional bakers use it to ensure their batters are fully mixed. Paula Peck, writing 1961’s The Fine Art of Baking, defines creaming as:

the combining of 2 or more ingredients by rubbing or beating them together…

with the back of a wooden spoon, an electric mixer, or the bare hand.

Peck, 18

She goes on to say the hands, “properly used, are the most efficient, sensitive tools you will ever own.” (19)

Forty years later, Michele Urvater also describes hand mixing techniques in Chocolate Cake, writing:

it is far more efficient and effective together using your hand and arm rather than a rubber spatula.

Urvator, 51

I break up the butter into pieces, add the sugar, and mix lightly with my clean fingertips. I’m looking to blend the sugar and butter together. There’s no real way to get air into the mix at this point. Once the sugar and egg are in one piece, I add the eggs and begin whisking. It’s here that I begin aiming for air. I make sure any lumps of butter or sugar are dissolved and the whole mixture is thick, the color lightened, and the ingredients are generally looking like a cake batter in the making.

Does this look like it came from the bowl of my Kitchenaid? No. But nobody complains about the final result. They’re too busy eating it.

Now I add the vanilla–any sooner and the alcohol in the extract “cooks” the eggs–and gently fold in the flour.

I trade the whisk for a large metal spoon and gently stir. A spatula is helpful here, as flour may need scraping off the bowl’s sides and off the spoon. Lacking photos of this, I give you two funnels, from the vanilla bottle.

The batter will come together quickly. Baking time in my oven was exactly 30 minutes.

Colwin recommended serving Simple Yellow Cake with stewed fruit, ice cream, or bitter orange marmalade. You cannot go wrong with any of these suggestions. At this time of year–I write in mid-August–fresh fruit is abundant, so it’s a matter of choosing your favorite fruit to accompany this cake, which is like a little black dress: it goes with everything.