Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange Cake

A sweet cake flavored with orange, baked with butter, milk, sugar, and eggs, topped with orange icing and orange slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Orange Cake

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Orange Cake

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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the egg whites and mix well.

  4. Stir in the sweet milk and orange flavoring.

  5. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, and cream of tartar.

  6. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, mixing until smooth.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake for 25-30 minutes.

  2. For the icing, boil orange juice and sugar until thick, then cool slightly.

  3. Spread icing between the layers and on top of the cake while still soft.

  4. Decorate the top with oranges cut into eighths.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Creaming with sugar traps air and gives the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Egg whites
Provide structure and help the cake set and hold its rise as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the cream of tartar to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Cream of tartar
Acts as an acid that works with the baking soda to help the cake rise and stay light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake, helps create a tender crumb, and dissolves into the icing to thicken it.

The step that matters

Gradually adding the dry ingredients. Adding flour in portions and mixing only until smooth keeps the batter from overdeveloping gluten, which would make the cake tough. Blending too vigorously can also knock out the air and gas the leavening needs to rise.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, milk, sugar, egg, cream, flour. 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.

More orange cake recipes

Filling 22Almond 6Pineapple 6Seville 4 See all 343 →

You might also like

Orange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipesOrange CustardOrange Custard56 recipes