Skip to main content
Dessert

Mocha Cake

A sweet cake flavored with coffee and chocolate, topped with a butter and powdered sugar frosting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Vanilla and nuts work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 638 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Mocha 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.

Make the cake

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

  2. Beat the yolks and whites of the eggs separately.

  3. Add the sugar to the yolks and beat well, then add the water and beat again.

  4. Sift in the flour, salt, and baking powder.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites and mix well.

  6. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake until done.

Frost and finish

  1. For the frosting, cream the butter and powdered sugar together.

  2. Add water and vanilla, and beat until smooth.

  3. Spread the frosting on the cooled cake and top with chopped nuts.

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. Vanilla + nutstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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 yolks and whites give the cake its structure and lightness.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure once mixed with the liquids and eggs.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and adds tenderness to the crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, spreadable frosting.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Egg whites hold the air beaten into them; stirring them in roughly loses that air and the cake comes out dense. Fold gently, keeping the batter airy, so the rise from the baking powder and the whites is preserved.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Macadamia nutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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

You might also like

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes