sponge cake with crispy layers

As I promised in the last post, here is the update on using up the phyllo dough. This was inspired by a pretty simple Chinese bakery cake standard. The baked goods I grew up on were more similar to this than the all American fare I experiment these days.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a recipe specifically for this application, so I used a basic vanilla sponge cake recipe and slightly sweetened whipped cream, both from Williams Sonoma. As for the phyllo dough, I went through a trial and error. The cake from Chinese bakeries have a relatively dry crispy layer center, so I baked off the phyllo layers straight from the fridge in a stack. That did not work out, since the edges curled and the results were overly dry and left a dusty flour taste on the palette. In order to get the layers golden brown and flat, I brushed each layer with some melted butter, similar to the approach used in the last post with the exception of sugar.

Flavor speaking, this was quite close to the ones from bakeries. The only downfall was the texture from the sponge cake, which was much less fluffy. The ones from bakeries have cake layers that are much taller. I'm thinking that if the cake was baked in a cake pan, rather than a sheet pan, with more batter, I would get a similar effect. Otherwise, this was a quite a replication success.