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Dessert

Sponge Cake Roll

A rolled sponge cake made with eggs, sugar, flour, butter, baking powder, jelly, lemon glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sponge Cake Roll

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the sponge

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, beat 3 eggs and 1 cup sugar until light and fluffy.

  3. Gently fold in 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon butter, and 1 teaspoon baking powder.

  4. Spread the batter in a turkey pan and bake until golden.

Roll the cake

  1. While hot, roll the cake with currant jelly or your choice of jelly.

Make the lemon mixture

  1. In a saucepan, combine 1 cup sugar, 1 egg, juice of 1 lemon, and 1 teaspoon cold water, then stir over low heat until the mixture thickens.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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
Beaten into a foam that traps air and sets into the sponge's light structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the beaten eggs hold their foam.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure as the batter sets in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the sponge rise.
Butter
Adds fat for a softer crumb and richer flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet mixture.

The step that matters

Roll the cake while hot. Warm sponge is flexible, so it can be rolled without cracking. Once it cools, the set crumb loses moisture and flexibility and is likely to crack.

Swap the currant

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

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

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