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Dessert

Plain Sponge Cake

A light cake made from eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, water, and a pinch of salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Plain Sponge Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the yolks of the eggs with the powdered sugar.

  2. Gradually stir in 1 cup of sifted flour.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites until stiff.

  4. Add 2 teaspoons of baking powder to the remaining flour and mix in.

  5. Slowly stir in the boiling water a little at a time.

  6. Add salt to taste.

  7. Do not add more flour, even if the mixture seems thin.

Bake

  1. Bake in shallow tins.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Egg yolks
Add richness and tenderness through fat and emulsifying compounds.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff foam, they trap air and give the cake its rise and light structure.
Flour
Provides the protein and starch that set into the cake's structure as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the batter rise and become airy.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps give it a fine, tender crumb.

The step that matters

Do not add more flour, even if the mixture seems thin.. Extra flour adds gluten and starch that make the cake dense and tough. A thin-looking batter is normal here, since the whipped whites and baking powder provide the lift as it bakes.

“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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