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Dessert

Orange Cake

A cake made with sugar, flour, water, egg yolks, orange rind, and a whipped egg white filling with orange zest and juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Orange Cake

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 ↓

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 the cake

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix 2 cups of sugar, 2 cups of flour, ½ cup of water, 5 egg yolks, and 1 teaspoon of grated orange rind.

  3. Pour the batter into a cake pan and bake until done, similar to a cream pie.

Make the filling and assemble

  1. Once cool, split the cake in half.

  2. For the filling, beat 2 egg whites with 1 cup of sugar, the grated rind, and juice of 1 orange until stiff.

  3. Spread the filling between the layers of the cake.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Flour + orangetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,821 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Egg yolks
Add richness and structure to the batter as they set during baking.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps keep it moist and tender.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they give the orange filling its light, airy body.

The step that matters

Beating the filling egg whites until stiff. Egg whites must be whipped to stiff peaks to trap air and hold their shape. Under-whipped whites stay runny and won't hold the filling between the layers.

Swap the orange

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

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

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