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Dessert

Mocha Tart

A tart made with eggs, sugar, mocha extract, flour, baking powder, whipped cream filling, and boiled icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Mocha Tart

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the yolks of the eggs with sugar until creamy.

  2. Add mocha extract and mix well.

  3. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the mixture.

  4. Gently fold in flour and baking powder.

Bake and fill

  1. Bake in two layers at 350°F (175°C).

  2. For the filling, whip the cream and mix in mocha extract and sugar to taste.

Ice and serve

  1. Ice the top with boiled icing made from sugar, eggs, butter, and lemon juice.

  2. Boil the icing ingredients until it jellies, then beat until thick enough to spread.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks and whipped whites give the sponge its structure and lift.
Flour
Provides the starch that sets the batter into a cake crumb once baked.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven, helping the layers rise and turn light.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps the yolks whip to a creamy texture.
Mocha extract
Adds the coffee and chocolate flavour throughout the cake and filling.
Cream
Whipped cream adds moisture and a light, airy texture to the filling.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Whites hold air only when beaten stiff; overmixing or deflating them while folding in the flour loses that air, leaving the layers dense instead of light.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, flour, cream, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, flour, cream, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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