Skip to main content
Dessert

Ashland Chocolate Cake

A chocolate cake made with chocolate, butter, sugar, eggs, sour milk, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Ashland Chocolate Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Dissolve the chocolate in ½ cup boiling water and let it stand.

  2. In a bowl, cream together ½ cup butter and 1 cup sugar.

  3. Add the beaten yolks of 2 eggs and the chocolate mixture to the bowl.

  4. Stir in ½ cup sour milk and 1 cup flour until combined.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites until just incorporated.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a sheet or loaf pan and bake.

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. 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. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Chocolate + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Flour
Provides the starch and gluten network that gives the cake its structure.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and add richness and tenderness.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps hold air when creamed with butter.
Egg whites
Folded in to add air and lift, giving a lighter crumb.
Egg yolks
Add richness, moisture and emulsifying fat to the batter.
Sour milk
Its acidity tenderizes the crumb and reacts with leavening to aid rising.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air whipped into the egg whites. Overmixing deflates the batter, which leads to a denser, less lifted cake.

“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.

More chocolate cake recipes

Filling 18French 14Marbled 13Black 11Dark 10Marble 7 See all 565 →

You might also like

Chocolate CreamChocolate Cream171 recipesChocolate CookiesChocolate Cookies76 recipesChocolate FudgeChocolate Fudge55 recipesChocolate Drop CookiesChocolate Drop Cookies50 recipes