Skip to main content
Dessert

Kenosha Sponge Cake

A sponge cake made with sugar, eggs, boiling water, flour, baking powder, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Kenosha Sponge Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Beat the egg yolks and sugar together until creamy.

Make the batter

  1. Add the boiling water, flour, baking powder, and salt; mix well.

  2. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  3. Gently fold the egg whites into the batter.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared baking pan and bake until golden.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Egg and flour 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
Whipped whites trap air for lift, and yolks add richness and structure to the batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps the yolks whip into a creamy, stable base.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking to help the cake rise.
Boiling water
Adds moisture and helps the batter spread and bake evenly.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whipped whites hold the air that lifts the cake. Stirring them in vigorously knocks out that air, so the cake bakes up dense; fold gently and keep the batter's volume.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes