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Dessert

Chocolate Marble Cake

A chocolate marble cake made by alternating chocolate batter with plain batter in a pan and baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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).

  2. Butter a cake pan.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  3. In another bowl, combine the flour and baking powder.

  4. Gradually add the flour mixture to the butter mixture, alternating with the milk.

  5. Dissolve the chocolate in a little milk or cream and stir it into a cup of the cake batter.

Marble and bake

  1. Spread the dark batter over the light batter in the pan, forming little rings to create a marble effect.

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

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
Creams with sugar to trap air, giving the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps create a light texture.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, binding the batter as the cake sets.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake as its proteins set in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise.
Chocolate
Adds flavor and a dark color to one portion of the batter, creating the marble pattern.

The step that matters

Marbling the batter. Spreading the dark batter over the light in loose rings keeps the two colors distinct. Overmixing blends them into an even brown and loses the marble effect.

“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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