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Dessert

Twelfth-night Cake

A sweet cake baked with sugar, flour, eggs, and decorated with peas, beans, cloves, angelica leaves, cherries, and a tiny Christmas tree.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and angelica share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 84 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Twelfth-night Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, rub and mix the sugar until smooth.

  3. Gradually add the flour mixed with baking powder, beating quickly.

  4. Add the well-beaten yolks, then fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

  5. Scrape down the sides of the bowl to remove lumps.

Bake and decorate

  1. Pour the batter into a pan and bake until it rises and fills the pan.

  2. Before frosting, insert the pea on one side, the bean and clove on the other.

  3. Mark the spots with a broom-straw.

  4. Ice and decorate the cake with angelica leaves and red cherries, placing a tiny Christmas-tree in the center.

  5. Serve gentlemen from the side with the clove and bean, and ladies from the side with the pea.

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. Clove + angelicatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together84 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Flour + angelicatop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together104 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg 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

Eggs
Well-beaten yolks and stiffly beaten whites give the cake its light, risen structure.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure once set by heat.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and fills the pan.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a fine, smooth batter when rubbed in.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Stiffly beaten whites hold air that makes the cake rise. Folding gently, rather than stirring, keeps that air from collapsing, so the cake stays light.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Clovethe original

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