Passover Sponge Cake

This Passover Sponge Cake is a light, airy and citrus-flavored Jewish dessert that you can serve after your seder dinner. Made with oranges and lemons, it has a bright flavor that will always remind me of my Grandma Yetta. This is her recipe dug out from the family archives.

Passover Sponge Cake

When I raided my grandmother’s recipe box so I could make this cake, she had the recipe listed as a citrus Passover sponge cake. That’s appropriate considering it includes orange juice, lemon zest and orange zest. Some people, though, only make this cake using lemon. Others only use oranges. In this instance, we’re using both.

As you know from some of my other citrus-infused recipes — Copycat Starbucks Ice Lemon Loaf, Key Lime Pound Cake and Greek Yogurt Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins — this is my favorite flavor profile. I mean, if I’m not going to have something chocolate from a Passover dessert charcuterie board, then I want something lemon, lime or orange. However, none of those aformentioned recipes are kosher for Passover. So if I want to serve a dessert with this flavor profile, it has to be this sponge cake.

Because this sponge cake is made specifically for Passover, there is no traditional flour in it or other baking basics such as baking powder. The binders are the matzo cake meal and the potato starch, and the cake gets its lift from the whipped egg whites. If you don’t whip them enough, the cake will end up flat, which is what happened with the Passover honey cake the first time we made it.

Ingredients

• 9 eggs separated
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 3/4 cup orange juice
• 1 tablespoon lemon zest, zest of one lemon
• 1 tablespoon orange zest, zest of one orange
• 3/4 cup matzo meal
• 3 tablespoons potato starch, using heaping tablespoons

Instructions

Preheat oven to 325 F. Coat the cake pan with cooking spray that is kosher for Passover.

Grind matzo meal until it becomes more like cake flour and less like matza crumbles. Sift matzo meal and potato starch into a bowl and set aside.

Separate egg whites into one bowl and egg yolks into another. Beat egg whites until stiff. Gradually add sugar to egg whites while continuing to beat. Beat egg yolks and then fold into the sugared and beaten egg whites.

Zest the lemon and orange peels and then fold in the fruit zests to your egg batter. Slowly add orange juice, gently folding it in. Add the sifted matzo meal and potato starch a little at a time, folding with a spatula until the batter is fully blended.

Place the angel food pan on a sheet pan. Then, pour batter in an angel food pan. Bake cake for 45 minutes.

After 45 minutes of baking, raise the temperature to 350 F. Bake for about 15 more minutes. At this point, a toothpick should come out clean.

Invert the pan on a wire rack and let cool for an hour. The cake should slide out on its own in this time. Serve on a cake plate surrounded by orange slices.

Notes

You can make a citrus icing for the cake if you’d like. In hindsight I should have done this because I think the presentation would have been prettier.

I suggest putting your angel food cake pan on a sheet pan before pouring the batter in for a simple reason: these kinds of baking pans usually have a removable bottom. If the seal isn’t perfect, there is a chance that the batter will leak out and start burning on the bottom of the oven. Trust me on this: it has happened too many times.

If you can find matzo cake meal at your local grocery store, then there is no need to grind the matzo meal into cake flour. We couldn’t find it where we live so I used a mortar and pestle to ground the matzo meal into flour. However, we could have planned ahead and bought it matzo cake meal online. That’s also an option if you’re looking for a gluten-free version of matzo cake meal.