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Dessert

Bread Crumb Cake

A sweet cake made with bread crumbs, chocolate, nuts, and eggs, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Chocolate and nuts work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 440 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Bread Crumb 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.

Prepare

  1. Mix bread crumbs, chocolate, baking powder, nuts, and flour in a bowl.

  2. Cream sugar with egg yolks until smooth.

  3. Add the sugar mixture to the dry ingredients.

Bake

  1. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites and lemon juice.

  2. Pour the batter into a greased baking pan.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until set and 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. Chocolate + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Nuts + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped and folded in to lighten the batter and give the cake its rise.
Egg yolks
Add richness and moisture, and help bind the batter.
Bread crumbs
Form the cake's base, giving body and a light, crumbly texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps tenderize the crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to help the cake rise.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the beaten egg whites and lemon juice. Egg whites hold air that gives the cake its lift. Folding gently preserves that trapped air; vigorous stirring deflates the batter and produces a denser cake.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, chocolate, nuts, flour, sugar, egg. 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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