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Dessert

Chocolate Cake

A chocolate cake with a chocolate filling made from melted chocolate, powdered sugar, milk, and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Chocolate 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 batter

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

  2. Beat the sugar and butter together until creamy.

  3. Add the egg yolks and mix well.

  4. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  5. Dissolve the cream of tartar and baking soda in the milk, then add to the mixture.

  6. Gradually mix in the flour until combined.

  7. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, melt the chocolate and mix with powdered sugar, milk, and beaten egg.

Bake and fill

  1. Bake the cake in two tins and spread the filling while hot.

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 + 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. Cream + chocolatetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,466 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Yolks add richness and the whipped whites add lift and structure to the cake.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds fat that gives the cake a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps the butter cream to a light texture.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Cream of tartar and baking soda
Together they react to produce gas that helps the cake rise.
Chocolate
Gives the cake its chocolate flavour and makes the filling rich and set.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites gently. The whites trap air that makes the cake rise. Stirring hard or vigorously deflates that foam, leaving a dense, flat cake.

“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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