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Dessert

Chocolate Marble Cake

A cake made with butter, sugar, eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, and chocolate, baked in layers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 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.

Prepare

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

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolks and mix well.

  3. Stir in the sweet milk.

  4. Sift the flour with the baking powder and gradually add to the mixture.

  5. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the batter.

  6. Take out 1 cup of the batter and mix in the melted chocolate and 1 tablespoon of sweet milk.

Bake and finish

  1. In a greased cake tin, alternate layers of the plain batter and the chocolate batter.

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

  3. Ice with white or chocolate icing, or both as preferred.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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
Creamed with sugar to trap air and give a tender, rich crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps hold air when creamed with butter.
Eggs
Provide structure and richness, and the whites add lift when beaten and folded in.
All-purpose flour
Builds the cake's structure as its proteins set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Grated chocolate
Adds chocolate flavour and the dark colour of the marbled layers.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Stiffly beaten whites hold the air that lifts the batter. Overmixing or stirring them vigorously deflates the foam, leaving a denser cake, so fold gently until just combined.

“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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