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Dessert

Layer Pound Cake

A layered pound cake flavored with lemon and orange, topped with a sweet icing and decorated with orange slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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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 ↓

Layer Pound 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.

Make the cake

  1. Beat the yolks of 12 eggs with 1 pound of sugar.

  2. Grate the peel of 2 lemons and add the juice of 1 lemon.

  3. Fold in the beaten whites of 8 eggs and ½ pound of sifted flour.

  4. Bake in jelly tins at 350°F (175°C).

Make the icing

  1. Beat the whites of 4 eggs with 1½ pounds of confectioner's sugar until stiff.

  2. Reserve some icing for the top of the cake.

  3. Add the grated peel and juice of ½ large orange to the remaining icing.

  4. Mix a little lemon juice into the reserved icing for the top, adding more sugar if needed.

Decorate

  1. Decorate with slices of orange dipped in boiled sugar and dried.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Egg yolks
Add richness and tenderness, and help bind the batter with sugar.
Egg whites
Beaten whites trap air, giving the cake lift and a light, open crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together once baked.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps the yolks thicken into a smooth batter.
Confectioner's sugar
Sweetens and thickens the icing that gives the cake its top layer.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten whites. Folding gently keeps the air in the beaten egg whites. Stirring hard knocks out that air, so the cake bakes up denser and less light.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Orangethe original
  4. Blueberryfits about as well

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