History can be a little bit tricky. What we mean by that is that sometimes it’s difficult to find out what happened only a few years ago, but it can be easy to determine what happened hundreds of years ago. Take this holiday, for instance. We don’t know who created this holiday or when they created it, but we do know the history of sponge cake quite well. So, what we’re going to do for this holiday is talk about sponge cake’s storied history.
During the 15th century, Medieval bakers came up with food items known as biscuits. What do these have to do with sponge cake? Well, they were more like sponge cake in texture than they were in texture to modern biscuits. So many food historians consider them to be the forefathers of sponge cake. Between the 1420s and 1615, these “biscuits” would become refined until the first true sponge cake recipe was released in England in 1615. Even though the first recipe for a sponge cake was printed in England, many food historians believe that these cakes actually came from Spain during the Renaissance.