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Dessert

Orange Cake

A cake made with butter, sugar, egg yolks, egg whites, ice water, flour, orange juice and rind, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Orange Cake

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Orange Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a mixing bowl.

  2. Add the sugar and egg yolks, mixing well.

  3. Beat in the orange juice, ice water, and alternately add the flour and beaten egg whites.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into layer cake tins.

  2. Bake until golden brown.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Egg whites
Beaten separately and folded in alternately with flour to lighten the batter's structure.
Egg yolks
Add richness and fat, helping the crumb stay tender.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and gets a light crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor, contributing to a tender texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown as it bakes.

The step that matters

Alternating flour and beaten egg whites. Adding the flour and whites in alternating additions, rather than all at once, keeps the air from the whites intact and prevents overmixing, which would toughen the cake and deflate the batter.

Swap the orange

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

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

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