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Dessert

Chocolate Cake

A sweet baked cake made with sugar, flour, milk, eggs, butter, lard, baking powder, chocolate, and iced with sugar syrup and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Chocolate 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.

Make the batter

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together the sugar, butter, and lard.

  3. Add the eggs and yolk, mixing well.

  4. Sift together the flour and baking powder, then add to the mixture alternately with the milk.

  5. Melt the Baker's chocolate with ½ cup of milk in a saucepan over low heat until it boils.

  6. Add the hot chocolate mixture to the batter and mix until combined.

Bake and ice

  1. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans and bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

  2. For the icing, boil the sugar and water for 10 minutes.

  3. Whip the egg whites until stiff, then gradually add the hot sugar syrup while continuing to whip until glossy.

  4. Spread the icing over the cooled cake layers.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Flour
Forms the main structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, and help bind the batter.
Butter and lard
Add fat for tenderness and a soft crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown and keep moisture.
Baker's chocolate
Gives the cake its chocolate flavor and deep color.

The step that matters

Adding the hot sugar syrup to the egg whites. The syrup must be hot and added slowly while whipping, so it cooks the whites and forms a stable, glossy foam instead of collapsing.

“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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