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Dessert

Mrs. Hodder's Sunshine Cake

A light, fluffy cake made with separate eggs, sugar, orange extract, and cake flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream 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 ↓

Mrs. Hodder's Sunshine Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Sift the cake flour seven times, measure, and set aside.

  2. Separate the eggs, placing the yolks in a small bowl and the whites in a mixing bowl.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the yolks until very light.

  2. Beat the whites to foam, then add cream of tartar and whip until dry and stiff.

  3. Gradually add sugar to the whites and carefully fold in.

  4. Add the yolks and fold in gently.

  5. Flavor with orange extract, then fold in the flour lightly.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into an ungreased pan and bake for 30 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.

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. Sugar + creamtop 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. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

Egg whites
Whipped to a foam, they trap air and give the cake its light, airy structure.
Egg yolks
Add richness and tenderness, and their color gives the cake its sunny yellow hue.
Granulated sugar
Stabilizes the whipped whites and adds sweetness and a fine, tender crumb.
Cake flour
Low-protein flour that sets the structure while keeping the crumb soft and delicate.
Cream of tartar
An acid that stabilizes beaten egg whites, helping them hold their volume.

The step that matters

Folding the whites and flour. Folding gently preserves the air whipped into the egg whites. Overmixing deflates the batter, which can make the cake dense and flat.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

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