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Dessert

Plain Cake

A simple cake made with eggs, sugar, milk, butter, flour, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Plain Cake

Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Plain Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs well.

  2. Add the sugar and then the softened butter.

  3. Stir in half of the milk, then half of the flour with the baking powder sifted in.

  4. Add the remaining milk and flour.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake in a square tin.

  2. Cover with chocolate icing or sifted sugar if desired.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + buttertop 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and moisture as they set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the crumb tender and moist.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter for an even crumb.
Flour
Provides the main structure as the proteins set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour and milk gently. Once flour is wet, its proteins begin forming gluten. Overmixing at this stage makes the cake tough and dense, so stir only until the flour is just combined.

“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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