Perfect Sponge Cake Recipe: Light Fluffy Moist and Tall
The perfect sponge cake should be light, fluffy, moist, tall, soft on the edges and of course beautiful. Easy with the right recipe, painfully frustrating with all of the rest. After testing many, many sponge cake recipes my kids got tired of taking sponge cake in their lunch boxes to school. So I gave them a break for a while. When I came back to it I retested the best ones but was still not satisfied, I tried a heap more that instead of using different amounts of the key ingredients used different methods of combining them. Eventually I tweeked a few of the best ones to come up with this light, fluffy and beautifully moist sponge cake recipe. My favorite.
Sponge Cake Recipe Ingredients
2 cups or 320g (11.29 ounces) plain all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups or 327g (11.53 ounces) sugar
1 Tbsp or 3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp or 7.5g (0.26 ounces) gelatin (powdered)
1/2 cup or 125ml vegetable oil such as canola oil
7 egg yolks or 105g (3.7 ounces)
1 cup or 250millilitres (8.45 fluid ounces) cold water
7 egg whites or 252g (8.89 ounces)
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
To decorate:
1 punnet or 250g (8.82 ounces) or approx 1 2/3 cups strawberries,
600millilitres (20.29 fluid ounces) cream (35% fat),
2 Tbsp icing (powdered) sugar,
1 tsp vanilla essence
(recipe source: adapted from this recipe)
Preheat the oven to 320F (160 degrees Celsius) if using a fan forced oven.
Place your flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and gelatin into a bowl and whisk it to incorporate air and get rid of any lumps.
Make a well in the centre of the flour mixture then pour in the oil, egg yolks and water in that order. Set that bowl to one side.
Put your egg whites and cream of tartar into another bowl and whisk on high speed until you get soft peaks.
Mix together the flour mixture for 30 seconds only or until just combined, don’t over-mix this.
Using a spatula fold in your egg whites in three batches.
Line but do not grease two 20cm (7.87 inches) cake tins and spread the mixture evenly between the two.
Bake in a slow oven, 320F (160 degrees Celsius) for 55-60 minutes.
When it is done leave in the tin and cool upside down.
See the video for how to decorate your sponge cake.
or try the ombre or rainbow cake decorating tutorials
by Ann Reardon How To Cook That
© All Rights Reserved Reardon Media PL 2013
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Is it gelatine powder or leaves?
I just finished making this cake and the taste is amazing. However it literally turned out reaaaaaaaalllll flat and I don’t know if it was because of my oven (really old and I don’t know if it even reaches the temperatures we set it to – but it must because it did take about 55 minutes to cook) or it was the wrong measurements for baking powder. Was it supposed to be heaped or levelled?
Just fought 2 cakes out of the oven, (small oven, BIG cakes). When I was a lad many moons ago, we had a next door neighbour, who made sponge cakes, that I have never even seen the quality and lightness of in a bakers shop, I have tried all sorts of recipes over the last 35 years, not even close, but THIS, they are still cooling off, and I have to wait at least 24 hours to try it (Is it considered bad taste to give someone a birthday cake with a few wedges missing? maybe I could give a box of chocolates).
This made me laugh, did they get the cake or the chocolates??
Hi Ann
Sorry, it’s your 8″ recipe I am going to try and would like measurements to do a 10″ perfect sponge cake too!
Many thanks
Hi Ann
I am excited to try your recipe! I have tried many different sponge recipes including doubling up ingredients to get a taller cake (unsuccessfully). I have a 2 tier birthday cake to make at the weekend. I will follow your recipe for 10 inch sponge but please could you give me measurements for an 8 inch as this will be the size of my top tier. Many thanks!
Hi Ann,
I love your website! You are a fantabulous baker!
As i type this comment, i am still making the perfect sponge cake. When i flipped the cake tins over to cool, one of the cakes, fell out! the other cake stayed upside down. Do you know why this happened?
I will be decorating the cakes in 3hrs time.
I can’t wait to see the end result 🙂
From Nini in Malaysia
hi nini, make sure you do not grease the sides of the cake tine before baking. You can leave them teh right side up if you haev really good non-stick pans.
I baked 2 cakes too, lined & ungreased. Just as in your case, one of my cakes fell out from the pan too when inverted to cool. Wonder why ..no idea yet as to the fluffiness or how moist the cake texture will be though.
Silly me was wondering how come the cakes looked so nice because when I first made them in 8inch baking pans, and let them cool upside down, some of the top of the cake was stuck on the cooling rack. After having watched your video on how to make the cake, I know now. You use cake pans with handles. You may want to specify this in your instructions. I was then able to see how you were able to easily turn the cake upside down and have the handles rest on cups in a way that the cake did not touch any surface. These pans are not easy to find for me although I am in the US. But I will keep looking. But I then made this cake in an angel tube pan, and it was excellent as well. Thanks for such a great recipe.
Glad they worked for you regine
I just made cupcakes using this recipe, they were lovely, but as soon as I took them out of the oven, they began to shrink. What can I do so this doesnt happen again?
If I need to make a double layer 9 x 13 cake … should I double the recipe?..
Thank you
Can I replace the cream of tartar with heavy cream or milk? Can I leave out the gelatins or use the lemon jelo instead ?? Thanks !
My cakes in the oven. I skimmed through the reading bits because my three year old was helping… needless to say her eagerness to do everything distracted me and in my haste I greased my cake pan instead of lining it.. so I’m sitting here worried. It will be difficult for it to climb the sides of the cake pan? Will it rise?
I made this cake again but this time I placed all the batter in an angel cake tube pan (with cooling legs or whatever the name is). It also took 1 hour to cook and it is SPECTACULARLY high. Wow. I have made chiffon cakes several times but that one surpasses them in both height and texture/flavor. I also added about 1/2 tsp grated orange zest.
Indeed the bestest sponge cake in terms of texture but not in terms of easiness with cooling upside down without some sticking on cooling rack, and with removing from pan. I even followed suggestion to use 2 cups on the side to help cake suspend in the air without touching cooling rack. But that part that touched cup stuck on the cup. Next time i may experiment baking the whole portion in a chiffon pan that has something on the sides to allow cake to remain upside down but without touching the rack.
Hi ann,
I made this cake 3 times already. First and second I use 300 gr plain flour use metric scale and turns out very nice. The 3rd times, I use 2 cups as measurement, and doesn’t comes out very nice, it’s bit hard and can’t put upside down.
In the recipes 2 cups 300 gr, and 1 1/2 cups sugar 330 gr. why 1 1/2 cups it’s more than 2 cups?
I’m a confused now and I just realise now. Pls help. 🙂
‘Cause sugar and flour have diferent weights. For example,
1 cup of flour is equal to 150gr. and 1 cup of sugar is equal to 220gr.
I don’t know about de rest though. Hahahaha.
Thanks Isadora.
Hi Ann,
Im baking now your fluffy sponge cake, am i right? Beat
the eggwhites until soft peak? I followed it all accdg. to your
Instruction. I’m also gaga on the best and the most fluffiest recipe
Of sponge cake. Will post the result later . Thanks Ann
Grace of NZ ( down under)
Ann, this is the best sponge cake i ever baked! Very very
Fluffy and soft. Eureka!!!! Thanks Ann, been looking
For this recipe for a long tie now .
Can the oil be replaced with melted butter?
I love your recipe!
I would like to ask what if I wanna use smaller cake tins like a 4-inch one?
What temperature and time should I use for baking?
Thanks a lot 🙂
Hi 🙂 just finish baking and it’s cooling right now. I already cant stop picking on it so moist and so delicious hope there’s still some left by the time of frosting 🙂
I made the sponge cake and boy was it fantastic. However, it did not rise quite as high as yours did, but it was still fantastic. I noticed you mentioned that you used caster sugar for your recipe. I used granulated sugar and it turned out just fine. Thank you so much for the recipe. It’s the best one that I have found and no need to further look elsewhere!
What king of gelatine did u used?
You should be able to find “Knox gelatine” (unflavored) in the pudding aisle at the supermarket.