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Dessert

Marble Cake

A cake made with alternating light and dark batters, containing butter, sugars, milk, flour, eggs, spices, and molasses.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 20 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Marble 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 light batter

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together 1 cup butter and 2 cups white sugar until light and fluffy.

  3. Add 1 cup sweet milk, 3 cups flour, the whites of 7 eggs, 2 teaspoons cream of tartar, 1 teaspoon baking soda, and 1 teaspoon lemon juice, then mix well.

Make the dark batter

  1. In another bowl, cream together 1 cup butter and 2 cups brown sugar.

  2. Stir in 1 cup molasses, 1 cup sour cream, 5 cups flour, the yolks of 7 eggs, a pinch of pepper, 2 tablespoons cinnamon, 1 tablespoon each of nutmeg, cloves, and allspice, 1 teaspoon vanilla, and 1 teaspoon baking soda, then mix until smooth.

Bake

  1. Butter a cake tin and alternate spoonfuls of the light and dark batter into the tin.

  2. Bake in the preheated oven until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

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. Butter + milktop 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. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and helps the batter feel smooth and moist.
Eggs
Whites add lift and structure; yolks add richness and help bind the batter.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps the creamed batter stay light and tender.
Molasses
Adds dark colour, moisture and a deep, slightly bitter sweetness to the dark batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic cream of tartar, lemon juice and sour cream to raise the cake.

The step that matters

Alternating the light and dark batter. Spooning the two batters in loose alternating layers creates the marbled pattern. Overmixing them together would blend the batters into one even colour and lose the marble effect.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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