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Dessert

Pennsylvania Sponge Cake

A sponge cake made with eggs, sugar, flour, and warm water, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour 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 ↓

Pennsylvania 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 sugar mixture

  1. Combine the sugar and warm water in a bowl.

  2. Let the mixture sit in a warm place.

Whip the eggs

  1. Break the eggs into a mixing bowl and gradually pour the warm sugar mixture over them while beating with an electric mixer.

  2. Continue beating over a pot of hot water for 30 minutes.

Finish and bake

  1. Gently fold in the flour and any flavoring.

  2. Immediately pour the batter into a buttered cake tin.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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. Sugar + flourtop 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 into a foam that traps air, giving the cake its main lift and airy structure.
White sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps stabilize the whipped egg foam.
Flour
Sets during baking to give the cake its final structure.

The step that matters

Keep beating the eggs and sugar over hot water. The beaten egg foam is the only source of lift in this cake. Beating it for the full time over warm water helps the sugar dissolve and the foam hold air, so the batter stays light when the flour is folded in.

“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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