Red velvet cake is frequently made with oil instead of butter. At its inception, the reaction between buttermilk and the raw cocoa available at the time resulted in a ruddy hue, hence the cake’s name. These days you’ll often find the batter tinted with food coloring—or sometimes beet juice. Like carrot cake, red velvet cake is often iced with cream cheese frosting, though the most traditional pairing is ermine.
German chocolate cake (named for American baker Sam German) is an oil cake with a rich, dark chocolate sponge courtesy of melted chocolate. But its real highlight is the sticky, custard-like pecan frosting.
Pound Cake
Pound cake gets its name from the original ratio of ingredients used to make it: a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs, and a pound of flour. You may see variations with names like quatre-quarts (the French term for pound cake) or 4:4 cake. While most pound cake recipes call for butter, others use multiple types of fat. Cream cheese pound cakes are particularly popular in the Southern US. Our recipe for Philly Fluff Cake, itself a pound cake variation, calls for a trifecta of butter, cream cheese, and shortening.
In some pound cake recipes, you’ll see the eggs separated and the egg whites whipped and folded into the batter; in others, you’ll find leaveners like baking soda and baking powder, bringing it well into the butter cake fold. A pound cake is usually baked in a loaf or Bundt pan. It’s served plain or topped with a simple powdered sugar icing, chocolate ganache, or dusting of powdered sugar. Many coffee cakes, sour cream cakes, Bundt cakes, and crumb cakes are variations of pound cake.
Types of Sponge Cake
Any recipe that contains no baking soda or baking powder but lots of whipped eggs or egg whites? That’s a sponge cake. There are several different types of sponge cake, and many of these types have regional nicknames.
Genoise Cake
Plain genoise is the base of many British and European desserts. A French term (pronounced “zhen-wahz” by the French, “jehn-oh-eeze” by Brits), the name genoise is actually a derivative of the city Genoa in Italy. There are many myths surrounding the cake’s provenance: it was invented by François Massialot, chef to a traveling French nobleman and also credited with the creation of crème brûlée; or possibly Genoese baker Giobatta Cabona while under the employ of the then-self-governing-Republic's ambassador to Spain; among others. The versatile sponge can be baked in a round cake pan and simply frosted, but it’s pliable enough to be baked in a jelly roll pan and formed into a roulade. Often lacking mixed-in flavoring, genoise is frequently brushed with a bold syrup, a.k.a. a cake soak, after baking, which also provides extra moisture.
Be warned: Perfecting your genoise technique can be challenging. Genoise sponge contains no commercial leaveners—the rise depends solely on the aeration of the eggs—so it can easily collapse in the oven. To make genoise, whole eggs are beaten with sugar until thick and ribbony, then flour (and sometimes butter) is added. Instead of butter, which can cause the light cake to fall, legendary cookbook author and pastry chef Nick Malgieri prefers to add in a few extra egg yolks: “They not only enrich the cake, they also provide greater stability, making the batter easier to prepare,” Malgieri writes.
