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Dessert

Orange Cake

A sweet cake made with sugar, flour, eggs, orange zest and juice, baked and frosted with egg whites and orange.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Orange Cake

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange 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).

  2. Beat the egg yolks and whites separately.

Make the cake

  1. Stir together the sugar and egg whites.

  2. Add the egg yolks, then the water, orange juice, and rind.

  3. Mix in the flour and baking powder.

  4. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake until golden.

Make the frosting

  1. For the frosting, beat the 2 egg whites with the orange juice and rind.

  2. Gradually add sugar until stiff peaks form.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and egg 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
Egg whites trap air for lift, and yolks add richness and tender structure to the crumb.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten that set the cake's structure as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake, softens the crumb, and stabilizes the whipped egg white frosting.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the cake rise and become light.
Orange
Adds bright citrus aroma and acidity from the rind and juice.

The step that matters

Adding sugar to the frosting gradually. Egg white foam only reaches stiff peaks if sugar is added slowly while beating. Adding it all at once, or any trace of fat or yolk, can leave the foam loose and weepy.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour, egg, lemon):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Orangethe original
  4. Blueberryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, egg, lemon. 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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