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Dessert

Chocolate Cake

A sweet baked cake made with sugar, butter, eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, and chocolate.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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.

Make the batter

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter. Add the eggs and mix well. Stir in the sweet milk.

  3. In another bowl, combine the flour and baking powder. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture.

  4. Melt the chocolate and let it cool, then stir it into the batter.

Bake and finish

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

  2. Once cooled, layer the cakes and frost with white icing.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps it cream with butter to trap air for a lighter crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor, and creaming with sugar traps air in the batter.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, and help bind the batter as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake once it sets in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Cake chocolate
Adds chocolate flavor and some richness to the batter.

The step that matters

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture. Adding flour in portions and mixing only until combined keeps the batter smooth and limits gluten development, which would otherwise make the cake tough.

“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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