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Dessert

Kenosha Sponge Cake

A light sponge cake made with eggs, sugar, boiling water, flour, baking powder, and salt.

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 ↓

Kenosha Sponge Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg yolks and sugar together until creamy.

  2. Add the boiling water, flour, baking powder, and salt, and mix well.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form, then gently fold them into the batter.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake until golden.

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. Sugar + eggtop 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
Whipped whites trap air that lifts the cake, and the yolks add richness and tenderness.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, beaten with the yolks, helps create a light, creamy base.
Flour
Forms the gluten and starch network that gives the cake its structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the batter rise and become airy.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. The whites hold the air that makes the cake light. Stirring or folding too vigorously knocks that air out, so the cake bakes up dense and flat instead of soft.

“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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