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Dessert

Fruit Cake

A dense cake made with raisins, currants, almonds, citron, and spices, baked at 350°F for 2.5 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fruit Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the batter

  1. Flour the fruits well.

  2. Cream the butter in a large bowl.

  3. Add the sugar to the creamed butter and mix well.

  4. Incorporate the yolks of the eggs, then the egg whites, mixing until smooth.

  5. Gradually add the floured fruits and mix until combined.

  6. Sift the baking powder into the remaining flour and fold it into the batter.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 2.5 hours.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Currant + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,359 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

  5. Almond + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together512 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and gives the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Yolks and whites add richness and structure that holds the heavy fruit in the batter.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake once it sets in the oven.
Raisins
Add moisture, chewiness and sweetness throughout the cake.
Currants
Add moisture, chewiness and sweetness throughout the cake.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes lighter.

The step that matters

Flouring the fruits well. Coating the fruit in flour helps it stay suspended in the batter instead of sinking to the bottom during baking. Dry, evenly coated fruit also blends in more easily when added to the batter.

“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 fruit cake recipes

White 89Black 40Christmas 29Eggless 27Molasses 23Apple 17 See all 952 →

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