Skip to main content

Orange Cake

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Orange Cake

Why it works: Orange and coconut work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 584 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Orange Cake

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Make 4 layers of batter using the yolks of the eggs for a golden cake.

  2. Grate the orange and coconut.

  3. Make icing using the egg whites and powdered sugar.

  4. Mix the grated orange and part of the coconut with some icing and spread between the layers.

  5. Ice the cake and sprinkle the remaining coconut on top.

  6. When grating the orange, include the rind and discard the tough part of the pulp.

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. Orange + coconuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together584 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  4. Coconut + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Coconut + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against coconut, sugar, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like

Orange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipesOrange CustardOrange Custard56 recipes