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Dessert

Fudge Cake

A sweet cake made with butter, sugar, milk, flour, eggs, baking powder, chocolate, and walnuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Fudge Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the milk and stir in the flour, which has had the baking powder sifted into it.

  3. Stir in the chocolate that has been dissolved in hot water.

  4. Add the nuts and then the eggs, which should be beaten separately.

Bake

  1. Bake in square tins or 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Chocolate + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,548 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine (roasted, nutty).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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
Creams with the sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps hold air when creamed with the butter.
Flour
Forms the structure that sets the cake as it bakes.
Eggs
Add structure, richness and lift to the batter when beaten separately.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises during baking.
Unsweetened chocolate
Provides the chocolate flavour and deep colour that define the fudge cake.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs. Beating the eggs separately and adding them last keeps the batter light. Overmixing after the flour goes in can toughen the crumb, and the baking powder's rising power is best used before the batter sits too long.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Hazelnutfits about as well
  3. Pecansfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

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