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Dessert

Mocha Cake

A cake made with egg yolks, sugar, mocha essence, flour, baking powder, whipped cream filling, and icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Mocha Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the yolks of 6 eggs with 1 cup of granulated sugar for 15 minutes.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of mocha essence.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites, 1 cup of flour, and 1 teaspoon of baking powder.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake in three layers.

  2. For the filling, mix 1 pint of whipped cream with 1.5 tablespoons of powdered sugar and 1 tablespoon of coffee essence.

  3. For the icing, combine ¾ cup of confectioner's sugar, 2 tablespoons of essence, and ½ tablespoon of water.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cream + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  5. Sugar + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

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

Egg yolks
Beaten with sugar to create a rich, thick base that carries the batter.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in to trap air, giving the cake lift and a light crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the layers rise.
Whipped cream
Adds moisture and a soft, creamy texture to the filling.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Egg whites hold air from beating, and overmixing or deflating them during folding makes the layers dense and flat instead of light and airy.

“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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