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Dessert

Lemon Sunshine Cake

A lemon cake made with a sugar syrup, egg yolks, flour, baking powder, salt, and lemon extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Lemon Sunshine Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar and water until it threads, about 236°F (113°C).

  2. Set the syrup aside to cool.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg yolks until light and fluffy.

  2. Fold the syrup into the egg yolks, whipping briskly for 1 minute.

  3. Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together 5 times.

  4. Fold the sifted mixture into the egg yolk mixture carefully.

  5. Add the lemon extract last.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into an ungreased tube cake pan.

  2. Bake in a 250°F (120°C) oven initially.

  3. Increase the heat as the cake rises and bake for about 45 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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
Provide richness, structure and moisture, and set as the cake bakes.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure once it is mixed into the batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, boiled into syrup, helps give it a tender crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.

The step that matters

Fold the sifted mixture into the egg yolk mixture carefully. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the yolks intact. Overmixing deflates the batter, which leads to a dense, flat cake.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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