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Dessert

Spice Cake

A sweet cake made with flour, sugar, bread crumbs, butter, water, baking soda, molasses, eggs, spices, and iced with powdered sugar mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Spice Cake

Why it works: Wheat and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 465 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Spice 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.

Make the cake

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

  2. In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugar, bread crumbs, butter, water, baking soda, molasses, eggs, and spices until well combined.

  3. Pour the batter into a square pan and bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

  4. Let the cake cool completely before removing it from the pan.

Ice and roll

  1. For the icing, mix powdered sugar, egg whites, winter wheat flour, corn starch, cream of tartar, and vanilla until smooth.

  2. Spread the icing on top of the cooled cake and roll it up like a jelly roll.

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. Wheat + corntop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Bread + wheattop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together209 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Flour + wheattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the main structure of the cake batter.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, moisture, and a deep color to the cake.
Eggs
Help bind the batter and add structure as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses to help the cake rise and brown.
Egg whites
Whipped into the icing to give it a light, smooth body.

The step that matters

Let the cake cool completely before removing it from the pan. A warm cake is fragile and can tear or crack when lifted and rolled. Full cooling lets its structure set so the icing and roll hold together.

“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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