Skip to main content
Dessert

Sponge Cake

A light cake made with eggs, powdered sugar, lemon, rose water, and potato or wheat flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,230 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Sponge Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs until thick and smooth.

  2. Gradually add the powdered sugar.

  3. Rub a lump of sugar over the lemon rind, then stir the juice into the mixture.

  4. Grate the lemon peel and add it to the mixture along with the sugar.

  5. Add the rose water and beat the mixture well.

Fold and bake

  1. Gently fold in the potato flour or fine wheat flour.

  2. Bake immediately in paper cases.

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. Lemon + potatotop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + rosetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

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

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Whipped eggs trap air, which gives the cake its light, airy structure as it sets.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves into the eggs to add sweetness and help stabilise the foam.
Potato flour or fine wheat flour
Sets around the trapped air to give the cake its body when baked.
Lemon
Adds bright acidity and fresh aroma from the juice and peel.
Rose water
Adds a floral aroma to the batter.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the flour. The batter's rise depends on the air whipped into the eggs. Folding gently keeps those bubbles intact, and baking straight away stops them collapsing before the cake sets.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, lemon, rose. 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.

More sponge cake recipes

Lemon 108White 98Cream 70Pudding 58Plain 48Velvet 40 See all 880 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesDeep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes