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Dessert

Chocolate Loaf Cake

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Chocolate Loaf Cake

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 ↓

Chocolate Loaf 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.

Melt and cream

  1. Dissolve the chocolate in ½ cup of milk.

  2. Mix in ½ cup of sugar.

  3. Beat the egg yolks until stiff and frothy.

  4. Cream the butter with 1 cup of sugar until light and fluffy.

  5. Add the beaten yolks to the butter mixture.

Make the batter

  1. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

  2. Stir in the dissolved chocolate mixture, remaining milk, flour, and baking powder.

  3. Pour the batter into a loaf pan.

Bake

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 to 40 minutes.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + flourtop 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Eggs
Yolks enrich and add richness, while whites whip into air that gives the cake lift and structure.
Butter
Creaming with sugar traps air and gives the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps make the crumb tender.
All-purpose flour
Its proteins form the gluten network that gives the cake its set structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter and heat, causing the cake to rise.
Chocolate
Provides the main chocolate flavour and a deep brown colour.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the whites, which lifts the cake. Stirring hard or over-mixing deflates the foam, leaving a dense loaf.

“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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