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Dessert

Twelfth Night Cake

A sweet cake with butter, sugar, eggs, milk, flour, lemon, raisins, caraway seeds, and silver pieces, frosted and decorated.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 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 ↓

Twelfth Night Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

  2. Beat the egg yolks separately and mix them into the creamed butter and sugar gradually.

  3. Add the milk alternately with the flour mixed with baking powder, mixing well.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

  5. Stir in the lemon rind, lemon juice, soaked raisins, and caraway seeds.

Prepare and bake

  1. Prepare a round pan with a tube in the center by lining it with buttered paper.

  2. Wrap silver pieces in thin white paper, dust with flour, and place them in opposite sides of the cake batter.

  3. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) until a toothpick comes out clean.

Ice and decorate

  1. Once cooled, ice the cake with thick white frosting and decorate with candied cherries, angelica, and holly.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + brandytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Butter and flour 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

Eggs
Egg yolks enrich the batter, and whipped whites add lift and a light crumb.
Butter
Creaming butter with sugar traps air and gives the cake a tender, rich texture.
All-purpose flour
Flour provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Granulated sugar
Sugar sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps aerate the batter.
Baking powder
Baking powder releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise in the oven.
Seeded raisins
Soaked raisins add moisture and chewy pockets of sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Whites hold air that gives the cake its lift. Folding gently keeps that air in, while vigorous stirring would deflate the batter and produce a dense cake.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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