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Dessert

Chocolate Cake

A chocolate cake with butter, sugar, eggs, milk, flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, and chocolate icing.

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

Chocolate 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. Sift the flour.

  3. In a bowl, cream the butter and sugar together.

  4. Add the eggs and sweet milk, mixing well.

  5. Combine the dry ingredients: flour, cream of tartar, and baking soda.

  6. Gradually add the dry mixture to the wet ingredients, mixing until smooth.

Bake and make the icing

  1. Pour the batter into jelly pans and bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

  2. For the icing, combine sugar, sweet milk, and chocolate in a saucepan.

  3. Bring to a boil and cook until it thickens enough to spread between layers.

  4. Add lemon extract to the icing and mix well.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the batter set as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake once its proteins set in the oven.
Cream of tartar
Acidic powder that works with baking soda to lift the batter and stabilize its texture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that makes the cake rise.
Chocolate
Adds flavor and body to the icing, which thickens as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cooking the icing until it thickens. Sugar, milk and chocolate must boil long enough for the mixture to thicken to a spreadable consistency. Too little cooking leaves a runny icing that will not hold between layers, while overcooking can make it stiff and grainy as it cools.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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