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Dessert

Chocolate Cake

A chocolate cake with frosting made from eggs, sugar, butter, flour, milk, and chocolate.

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

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.

Prepare the cake

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

  2. Cream together the sugar and butter, then add the milk and mix well.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and add to the mixture, reserving 2 egg whites.

  4. Sift together the flour, cream of tartar, and baking soda, then gradually add to the wet ingredients.

  5. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans and bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

Make and finish the frosting

  1. For the frosting, beat the reserved egg whites until stiff, then gradually add sugar and grated chocolate, flavoring with lemon.

  2. Frost the cooled cake.

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

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

  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

Eggs
Provide structure and richness, and help the batter set as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor in the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps give it a tender, browned crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidity in the batter to produce gas that helps the cake rise.

The step that matters

Beating the reserved egg whites until stiff. Stiff egg whites trap air that lightens the frosting. Under-beaten whites stay runny and won't hold the sugar and chocolate, while over-beaten whites turn dry and grainy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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