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Dessert

Golden Cake

A cake made with milk, flour, baking powder, butter, sugar, egg yolks, orange extract, and nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Golden Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  2. Gradually add the sugar and the yolks of the eggs, beaten until thick and lemon-colored, along with the orange extract.

  3. Mix and sift the flour and baking powder, then add it alternately with the milk to the butter mixture.

  4. If desired, omit the orange extract.

  5. Add the nuts.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared baking pan and bake.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 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

Egg yolks
Add richness and structure, and help the batter emulsify and set.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor, and carries air when creamed with sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps trap air when creamed with butter, adding lightness.
Milk
Adds moisture that hydrates the flour and loosens the batter.

The step that matters

Beat the yolks and sugar until thick and lemon-colored. Beating the yolks with sugar traps air and builds volume, which helps the cake rise and gives it a light crumb. Under-beating leaves a dense cake.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, butter, sugar, egg, meat. 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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