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Dessert

Orange Cake

A cake made with sugar, eggs, butter, milk, flour, baking powder, lemon extract, orange and lemon rinds, and a sweet orange filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Orange Cake

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix sugar with egg yolks until well combined.

  2. Add beaten egg whites and mix gently.

  3. Incorporate butter and milk.

  4. Add flour until the batter is thick like pound cake.

  5. Stir in baking powder and lemon extract.

  6. Pour batter into jelly pans.

  7. Bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, grate the rinds of the oranges and lemon.

  2. Combine the grated rinds with their juice, water, sugar, and cornstarch in a saucepan.

  3. Boil until smooth.

  4. Cool before spreading between the cake layers.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Eggs
Whites add lift and airy structure, while yolks add richness and help bind the batter.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the cake rise and become light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown while tenderizing the crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor in the cake.
Cornstarch
Thickens the orange and lemon filling into a smooth, spreadable custard-like mixture.

The step that matters

Boil the filling until smooth. Cornstarch only thickens fully once it reaches a boil and its starch granules swell and gelatinize. Stopping early leaves a thin, gritty filling that will not hold between the layers.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

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