Do dogs really smell not only the cake, but the flour, sugar, etc. also?

What is the cake, if not the flour, sugar, etc.?

Do you mean they smell all the ingredients separately?

Yes.

No surprising that various species can do different things. Humans are NOT the be all , end all species.

Dogs have 10,000 to 100,000 times better sense of smell than humans. Of course then can detect specific things. Why do you think they train dogs for bomb and drug detection.

Their taste buds are a completely different story.
A dog’s sense of taste is less refined than a human’s, meaning they can detect basic flavors like sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, but they have significantly fewer taste buds (around 1,700 compared to a human’s 9,000), making their taste perception less nuanced; however, their strong sense of smell compensates for this, playing a much larger role in how they experience food flavors.

Your response seems a little rude.

I don’t find it surprising that other species can do different things, and I am aware they can smell plenty of things.

I had assumed that once a cake had been made, the individual smells of those ingredients went away because now it is all combined and baked. I had assumed drugs or bomb sniffing was different.

It was an honest question. I am not claiming to be an expert, I know a lot about dogs. And I know they can smell way better than we can. Nothing I have read or watched used the cake example, so I wasn’t sure if that part was actually true.

No offense meant. Simple facts.

There’s no way for us to know how dogs experience the smell of cake, but a properly trained dog can alert to half a teaspoon of sugar diluted in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. So I’m certain that a dog could tell you whether there are, for example, eggs in a cake. While they probably have a good idea of what a complete cake smells like, they might also be able to discern the list of ingredients.

I had assumed that once a cake had been made, the individual smells of those ingredients went away because now it is all combined and baked. I had assumed drugs or bomb sniffing was different.

I think you’re generally right about that. Certainly, the baked mixture smells very different than the raw one. However, even humans can smell more detail in a baked cake than just, “Oh, a cake.” I’d trust myself to pick out a cake with ground nuts rather than flour, possibly even one with whole-wheat flour vs. regular. I could identify the one vegan cake in a row of cakes with eggs (I think). I have in the past made a cake with butter, and then the same recipe with shortening, and those were quite different as well.

This theory of distinct scents, by the way, is often used to explain why dogs react differently to smells we consider gross. It’s possible that regurgitated or pre-digested meals, for example, simply smell like the different foods consumed. Whereas we, with our much blunter sense of smell, have retained only the ability to detect a warning smell of bacteria which might make us sick. (Of course, part of this is cultural).

If you’d like to read more, I like “What the Dog Knows” by Cat Warren. I also enjoyed “Inside of a Dog”, by Alexandra Horowitz, though that one is a bit more dry. Also, these videos about allergen detection dogs might be interesting to you.

PS: For some fun training with your own dogs, amateur scent detection is pretty exciting.

^^ I know I’m silly, but I just had to mention the dog book written by a cat. heeheehee

^^ I thought that too!

There’s a sense in which we can also smell the ingredients in cake, but we only get the top notes. A chocolate cake and a vanilla cake smell different from one another. Maybe it’s like that for dogs, only much more so.

Dogs smell things in much the same way we see color.