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Dessert

Chocolate Sponge

A steamed chocolate sponge made with eggs, sugar, milk, chocolate, flour, baking powder, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and chocolate are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,404 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Chocolate Sponge

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg yolks with the sugar.

  2. Add the grated chocolate and milk alternately.

  3. Mix the baking powder into the flour and add to the mixture.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  2. Serve with whipped cream.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 and folded in, they trap air to give the sponge its light, airy structure.
Egg yolks
Beaten with sugar, they add richness and help build a tender, moist crumb.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten network that sets the cake's structure as it steams.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming, helping the batter rise and stay airy.
Grated unsweetened chocolate
Supplies the chocolate flavour and some fat that adds moisture to the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps stabilise the beaten yolks.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air bubbles in the whites intact. Stirring vigorously deflates them, which leads to a dense rather than light sponge.

“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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