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Dessert

Maple Sugar Cake

A cake made with sugar, butter, milk, eggs, flour, baking powder, and maple syrup, finished with a maple syrup filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Maple Sugar 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.

Make the cake

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

  2. Cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the milk and eggs, mixing well.

  4. Gradually add the flour and baking powder, stirring until combined.

  5. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans and bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, boil the maple syrup until it reaches a soft wax consistency.

  2. Beat the egg white until stiff peaks form.

  3. Pour the hot syrup over the beaten egg white.

  4. Beat thoroughly until well combined.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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).

Butter and flour 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

Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, traps air for a light crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness, and holds air when creamed with sugar.
Eggs
Add structure and binding, helping the batter set as it bakes.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas as it heats, making the cake rise and become light.
Maple syrup
Adds sweetness and maple flavour, and thickens to a soft wax when boiled.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot syrup over the beaten egg white. Hot sugar syrup poured into whipped egg white cooks the white gently into a stable, glossy foam. Pouring slowly while beating keeps the foam from deflating or cooking unevenly.

“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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