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Dessert

Boiled Sponge Cake

A sponge cake baked with eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour 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 ↓

Boiled Sponge 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.

Prepare

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

  2. In a bowl, beat the eggs and sugar together.

  3. Pour the boiling water over the egg and sugar mixture.

  4. Sift in the flour and baking powder, then mix until smooth.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan.

  2. Bake for 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

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. Sugar + flourtop 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
Provide structure and lift through the foam made when beaten with sugar.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure once the batter sets in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps stabilize the beaten egg foam.
Boiling water
Adds moisture and helps the batter cook through evenly.

The step that matters

Pouring in the boiling water. Hot water must be poured in while the egg and sugar mixture is being combined, not left to stand. Adding it too slowly or letting the foam collapse can make the cake dense, since the egg foam is what traps air for rising.

“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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