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Dessert

Cream Sponge Cakes

A light sponge cake made with eggs, cream, sugar, flour, baking soda, and cream of tartar, baked in greased pans.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cream Sponge Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grease the pans before starting.

Make the batter

  1. Break the eggs into a teacup and fill it with cream.

  2. Pour the eggs and cream into a mixing bowl and beat with an egg beater.

  3. Gradually add the sugar while continuing to beat.

  4. Sift the flour with cream of tartar and baking soda, then add to the mixture.

  5. Incorporate a little lemon juice or vanilla.

  6. Beat the batter constantly.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour the thin batter into the prepared pans and bake.

  2. Top with white icing once cooled.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Eggs
Provide structure and lift, setting into the cake's crumb as it bakes.
Rich cream
Adds moisture and richness, giving the cake a tender crumb.
Fine granulated sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps keep the crumb soft and moist.
All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set in the oven.
Cream of tartar and baking soda
React together to leaven the batter, helping the cake rise.

The step that matters

Beat the batter constantly. Beating keeps the batter evenly aerated and blended so the cake rises uniformly. Letting it stand or stopping can cause the thin batter to deflate and bake unevenly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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

“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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