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Dessert

Orange Cake

A layered orange cake with a jelly made from orange juice and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Orange Cake

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 ↓

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.

Make the cake

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

  2. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  3. Add the sifted flour, sweet milk, and baking powder; mix well.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

  5. Pour the batter into jelly pans and bake until golden.

Make the jelly

  1. For the jelly, combine the orange juice, grated rind, cold water, and sugar in a pot over boiling water.

  2. When hot, stir in the yolks of the beaten eggs.

  3. Just before removing from heat, stir in the beaten egg white.

Assemble and serve

  1. Once cooled, layer the jelly between the cake layers and frost the top with the remaining egg.

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

Eggs
Egg yolks and white thicken the orange jelly and add richness and structure to the cake.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds fat that gives the cake a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and jelly and helps the creamed mixture hold air.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure once its proteins set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises in the oven.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and citrus flavour to the jelly filling.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg yolks into the hot jelly. Eggs can scramble if they meet very high heat too quickly. Stirring them in while the jelly is hot but off the boil, and keeping it moving, helps the yolks thicken it smoothly.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, flour, milk, 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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