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Dessert

Orange Cake

A sweet cake made with sugar, flour, butter, sweet cream, egg whites, baking powder, and orange and lemon flavorings, topped with a boiled icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Orange Cake

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange 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 cake

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

  2. Cream the sugar and butter until very light.

  3. Pour in the sweet cream and mix well.

  4. Add the flour and egg whites, then mix until combined.

  5. Bake in layers until golden.

Make the filling and finish

  1. For the filling, make boiled icing by heating 1 pound of sugar with 2 egg whites.

  2. Squeeze in the juice of 2 oranges and 1 lemon.

  3. Add the grated rind of 1 orange and ½ lemon.

  4. Stir in powdered sugar until the icing is thick enough to spread.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter 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
Creamed with sugar to trap air, giving the cake a light, tender crumb.
Egg whites
Add structure and lift to the batter as they set during baking.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure as its proteins set with heat.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown while creaming aerates the batter.
Sweet cream
Adds moisture and richness to the batter.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises in the oven.

The step that matters

Thickening the boiled icing. Sugar syrup heated with egg whites must reach a stable thickness before it is spread; undercooked icing stays runny, while the powdered sugar added afterward stiffens it further. Adding juice and rind too early can thin the icing and make it harder to thicken.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, butter, cream, egg, lemon. 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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