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Dessert

Fudge Layer Cake

A layered cake made with chocolate, sugar, butter, eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, nuts, and beaten egg whites, baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 Layer 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. Boil the grated chocolate and water until thick as cream.

  2. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  3. Add the beaten egg yolks and milk to the mixture.

  4. Stir in the chocolate, flour, baking powder, and chopped nuts.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Bake

  1. Bake in two layers at 350°F (175°C).

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 + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Flour + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 add richness and a tender crumb.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter.
Egg whites
Folded in last to trap air and lighten the cake's texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises.
Grated chocolate
Adds chocolate flavour and a fudgy richness to the batter.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the whites; stirring vigorously deflates them, leading to a denser, flatter cake.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Hazelnutfits better
  3. Pecansfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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