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Dessert

Egg Rock Cake

A layered cake made with eggs, sugar, flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, and frosted with chocolate and pineapple-flavored filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Egg Rock 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.

Prepare the batter

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

  2. In a bowl, mix sugar, eggs, flour, baking soda, and cream of tartar until smooth.

  3. Pour the batter into round cake tins and bake until golden.

Make the filling and frosting

  1. Layer the cakes with white filling made from egg white, powdered sugar, and pineapple flavoring.

  2. Frost the top cake with a mixture of chocolate frosting and white filling.

  3. Frost the bottom cake with chocolate frosting.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Cream + chocolatetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Pineapple + chocolatetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together154 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide structure and moisture to the batter as it sets in the oven.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that lifts the cake.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter, helping it rise and keeping its texture stable.
Egg white
Whips into the white filling, giving it a light, airy texture.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

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