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Dessert

Date Cake

A stale Madeira cake layered with date icing and topped with chopped almonds or pistachios.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Date Cake

Why it works: Almond and dates work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 217 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Date Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble

  1. Slice the stale Madeira cake horizontally.

  2. Spread the slices thickly with date icing.

  3. Reassemble the cake and cover it with date icing.

  4. Garnish with chopped almonds or pistachios.

Make the date icing

  1. Cook dates in claret with sugar until creamy, then sieve.

  2. In a saucepan, combine cane icing sugar and date puree, stirring until warm and blended.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Almond + datestop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together217 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Date + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-methylbutanol (malty, whiskey).

  3. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Dates + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together985 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Date + datestop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together20 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale madeira cake
Forms the base layers, with a dry crumb that soaks up the icing well.
Dates
Provide sweetness, body and a thick, moist texture to the icing.
Claret
Softens the dates and adds a winey, fruity flavour as the dates cook down.
Cane icing sugar
Sweetens the icing and thickens it as it dissolves into the warm date puree.

The step that matters

Cook the dates in claret until creamy, then sieve. Dates must soften fully so the puree is smooth; any lumps or leftover skins will make the icing gritty. Cooking gently keeps the wine from reducing into bitterness.

Swap the date

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (almond, dates, wine, sugar):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Datethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, dates, wine, sugar. 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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