PLAIN SPONGE CAKE

This is a plain sponge cake, for everyone to start baking and gives you the confidence for baking.you can prepare the cake  in different forms at different occasions. You can can dress up the cake with any frosting, cut into different shapes according to the occasions you want.  Or you can pour the same batter into muffin pans and bake it as muffins and pack for your picnic. Once you start to bake, you can explore things like anything, the way you will amaze of yourself !!!

Ingredients:

1. All purpose flour (maida) - 1 cup
2. Sugar - 3/4 cup
3. Eggs - 2
4. Butter or any refined oil - 1/2 cup
5. Vanilla essence - 1 tsp
6. Baking soda - 1 tsp ( not must )

Method:

1. Seive maida  and baking powder and keep it seperately.

2. Pour the eggs into a bowl, beat until it becomes frothy. keep it seperately.

3. In an another bowl, Add oil or butter at room temperature ( not directly from the fridge). Add sugar to that and beat until the sugar and oil/butter blends together or until the sugar melts to some extent.

4. Now mix the beaten egg to the sugar and butter/ oil mixture and mix together.

5. Seperate 1 cup of flour into four parts. Add each part  one at a time to the egg, sugar, butter mixture and beat nicely without lumps. Repeat the same process for the rest of the 3 parts of the flour.

6. Add vanilla essence and mix together.

7. Grease the baking pan with butter and sprinkle  flour all over the pan. ( Instead of Greasing you can even line baking paper to the pan, cutting to the right size of the pan. ) The level of the  mixture you are pouring should be half of the depth of the pan. The cake should have some place to bake. Otherwise the batter will overflow while baking.

8. Preaheat the oven before keeping the baking pan inside the oven.

9. Bake it for 190 deg C for 25-30 minutes. As the baking time varies from each oven, you can check once top of the cake gets golden brown . Insert a tooth pick in centre of the cake, if it comes out not sticky the cake is ready or if it sticks, bake for 5 more minutes.

10. After removing from the pan, cool the cake for 20 minutes. You can reverse the cake to a wide plate and  once it gets  completely cool, its ready to serve.