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Dessert

Good Sponge Cake

A light, airy cake made with eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, lemon extract, and boiling water.

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

Good Sponge Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the yolks of the eggs and add the sugar, beating for 10 to 15 minutes.

  2. Add the beaten egg whites.

  3. Add the boiling water just before incorporating the flour.

  4. Sift the baking powder with the flour before adding it to the mixture.

  5. Add the sifted flour mixture to the batter.

  6. Flavor with lemon extract.

Bake

  1. Bake in three layers.

Make the icing

  1. Beat the reserved egg whites to a stiff froth.

  2. Add 6 teaspoons of powdered sugar for each egg.

  3. Flavor the icing with lemon.

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. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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
Whites trap air for lift, while yolks add richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the cake its structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and tenderizes the crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, causing the cake to rise.

The step that matters

Add the sifted flour mixture to the batter. Mixing flour in too vigorously or for too long develops gluten, which makes the cake tough and dense instead of light.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Figfits about as well

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