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Dessert

Boiled Sugar Sponge Cake

A sponge cake made by boiling sugar and water, then mixing with eggs and flour, baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Boiled Sugar Sponge 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 batter

  1. In a saucepan, boil the sugar and cold water until clear.

  2. In a large bowl, pour the hot sugar mixture over the eggs and beat vigorously for 20 minutes.

  3. Gently fold in the flour without beating.

  4. Add flavoring to taste.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a loaf pan or bar pan.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 to 40 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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. 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
Whipped with the hot syrup to trap air, giving the cake its main structure and lift.
Flour
Sets with the egg structure during baking to give the cake its body.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, boiled with water, forms the syrup that is beaten into the eggs.

The step that matters

Beating the hot sugar syrup into the eggs. Beating vigorously for the full 20 minutes incorporates air into the eggs, which is what makes the sponge rise. Folding the flour gently afterward keeps that air from being lost.

“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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