Instead of lemons, you may use for flavouring this cake, the yellow rind of _two_ oranges grated on the sugar, and the juice of _three_ mixed with the spice. Orange-rind being stronger and more powerful in taste than that of lemon, a smaller quantity of it will suffice.
You may bake the above mixture in little tins, like queen-cakes; taking care to grease them with _fresh_ butter.
This mixture will make a nice pudding; using only _half_ a pound of rice-flour, but the above quantities of all the other ingredients. Bake it in china or handsome white-ware, as it must go to table in the dish it is baked in.
RICE SPONGE-CAKE.--Put twelve eggs into a scale, and balance them in the other scale with their weight in broken loaf-sugar. Take out four of the eggs, remove the sugar, and balance the remaining eight eggs with an equal quantity of rice-flour. Rub off on some lumps of the sugar, the yellow rind of three fine large ripe lemons. Then powder all the sugar. Break the eggs, one at a time, into a saucer, and put all the whites into a pitcher, and all the yolks into a broad shallow earthen pan. Having poured the whites of egg from the pitcher through a strainer into a rather shallow pan, beat them till so stiff that they stand alone. Then add the powdered sugar, gradually, to the white of egg, and beat it in well. In the other pan, beat the yolks till very smooth and thick. Then mix them, gradually, a little at a time, with the white of egg and sugar. Lastly, stir in, by degrees, the rice-flour, adding it lightly, and stirring it slowly and gently round till the surface is covered with bubbles. Transfer it directly to a butter tin pan; set it _immediately_ into a brisk oven; and bake it an hour and a half or more, according to its thickness. Ice it when cool; flavouring the icing-with lemon or rose. This cake will be best the day it is baked.
In every sort of sponge-cake, Naples-biscuit, lady-fingers, and in all cakes made without butter, it is important to know that though the egg and sugar is to be beaten very hard, the flour, which must _always_ go in at the last, must be stirred in very slowly and lightly, holding the whisk or stirring-rods perpendicularly or upright in your hand; and moving it gently round and round on the surface of the batter without allowing it to go down deeply. If the flour is stirred in _hard and fast_, the cake will certainly be tough, leathery, and unwholesome. Sponge-cake when cut should look coarse-grained and rough.