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Dessert

Sponge Roll

A sponge roll cake made with eggs, sugar, flour, water, and baking powder, baked and rolled with jelly.

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 ↓

Sponge Roll

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).

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg yolks and sugar lightly.

  2. Add the flour and a little baking powder.

  3. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

  4. Pour the batter into a large pan and bake until done.

Roll the cake

  1. Prepare a greased piece of brown paper sprinkled with sugar.

  2. Turn the cake out onto the paper, spread with jelly, and roll it up quickly.

  3. Cook the rolled cake in the paper.

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
Whipped whites give the batter lift and an airy, light structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps the beaten yolks become light and thick.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten that set the sponge into a cake structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise in the oven.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air trapped in the whites; stirring or deflating the batter makes the sponge dense and flat.

“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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