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Dessert

Balmoral Cake

A simple cake made with eggs, flour, and sugar, baked at 300°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Balmoral Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Break the eggs into a bowl.

  2. Add the sugar to the eggs.

  3. Sift the flour.

  4. Beat the eggs and sugar together for 20 minutes over a bowl of hot water until thick and creamy.

Make the batter

  1. Quickly and lightly stir in the flour.

  2. Butter a cake tin and sprinkle the tin with sugar.

  3. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin.

Bake and cool

  1. Bake at 300°F (150°C) for 20 to 30 minutes.

  2. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Eggs
Whipped with sugar to trap air, giving the cake its light, airy structure.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake once the eggs set during baking.
Sugar
Whisked with the eggs to thicken them and add sweetness and tenderness.

The step that matters

Quickly and lightly stir in the flour. Folding gently preserves the air whisked into the eggs. Overmixing knocks out that air and deflates the batter, leading to a denser 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.

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