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Dessert

Cream Sponge

A light sponge cake made with eggs, sweet cream, sugar, flour, baking powder, and optional flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cream Sponge

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Break the eggs into a cup and fill with sweet cream.

  2. In a bowl, mix the eggs and cream with sugar, flour, and baking powder.

  3. Add flavoring to suit your taste.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared baking pan and bake until 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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Provide structure and richness, helping the batter set into a cake crumb as it bakes.
Sweet cream
Adds moisture and richness, producing a softer, more tender crumb.
Fine sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its starch sets during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, making the batter rise and become light.

The step that matters

Bake until golden. Heat sets the egg and flour structure and drives browning from the sugar. Underbaking leaves the centre gummy and sunken, while overbaking dries the crumb, so watch the colour closely.

“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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