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Dessert

Burnt Sugar Cake

A cake made with burnt sugar, butter, eggs, flour, and baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Burnt Sugar 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 burnt sugar

  1. Burn 1 cup of sugar.

  2. Add ½ cup of water to the burnt sugar, then boil for a few minutes.

Make and bake the cake

  1. In a bowl, mix 1½ cups of granulated sugar, butter, and the yolks of the eggs.

  2. Add the whites of the eggs, ½ cup of water or milk, and the burnt sugar to the mixture.

  3. Dissolve the baking powder in the remaining ½ cup of water or milk.

  4. Add the dissolved baking powder and flour to the mixture and mix well.

  5. Bake in 3 layers at 350°F (175°C).

Make the icing

  1. Cook 1 cup of granulated sugar, 3 tablespoons of burnt sugar, and ¼ cup of water until it forms a soft ball in cold water.

  2. Add the beaten white of egg to the icing mixture and beat well.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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 and whites add richness, structure and lift to the batter.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the layers rise and turn light.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer crumb.
Burnt sugar
Gives the cake its characteristic bitter-caramel flavour and deep colour.

The step that matters

Cooking the icing to soft ball stage. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration to set into a soft, spreadable icing. Undercooked syrup stays runny, while overcooked syrup turns hard and grainy as it cools.

“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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