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Dessert

Delicious Sponge Cake

A sponge cake made with eggs, sugar, flour, salt, flavoring, and a flour‑water paste lining the tins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Delicious Sponge 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.

Prepare

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

  2. To make the paste, mix flour and water, roll it out, and line greased brick-shaped tins.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg whites until very stiff.

  2. Beat the yolks until they are bubbly.

  3. Add the sugar to the yolks and beat until dissolved.

  4. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

  5. Sift in the flour and mix until combined.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into the lined tins.

  2. Bake for nearly an hour.

  3. Do not remove the paste until ready to serve.

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

Eggs
Whites beaten stiff trap air, giving the cake its light, risen structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, beaten with the yolks, helps give a fine, tender crumb.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure once mixed into the batter, and also makes the protective paste.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Beaten egg whites hold the air that lifts the cake. Stirring them vigorously knocks that air out, leaving a dense, flat sponge instead of a light one.

“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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