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Dessert

Bride Cake

A large, spiced cake made with flour, butter, sugar, eggs, currants, almonds, candied citrus, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Bride Cake

Why it works: Nutmeg and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,115 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Bride 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

  1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Sift the flour and set it aside.

Make the batter

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

  2. Add the ground mace and nutmeg to the mixture.

  3. Incorporate the beaten eggs gradually, mixing well.

  4. Wash and dry the currants, then fold them into the batter.

  5. Add the sliced almonds, citron, candied orange, and candied lemon.

  6. Stir in the brandy until fully combined.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared cake pan and bake for several hours until a skewer comes out clean.

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. Nutmeg + almondtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and tenderness through the creamed, aerated base of the cake.
Fine flour
Forms the structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a light texture when creamed with butter.
Currants
Add moisture and sweetness, and their fruit pieces give the cake body.

The step that matters

Incorporate the beaten eggs gradually. Adding eggs slowly lets each portion emulsify into the creamed butter and sugar. Adding them all at once can cause the batter to curdle and lose its air, leading to a dense cake.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, mace, nutmeg, egg, almond):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, mace, nutmeg, egg, almond. 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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