Name: Tutti Frutti Cake
Ingredients: 1 pound cake mixture; French fruit glace (angelique, apricots, cherries, almonds, figs); water icing

Why it works: Apricot and fig share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 97 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Tutti Frutti Cake

Ingredients

1 pound cake mixture
French fruit glace (angelique, apricots, cherries, almonds, figs)
water icing

Directions

Prepare

Prepare a pound cake mixture and bake it in suitable pans.
Chop the assorted French fruit glace finely.

Finish

Mix the chopped fruit with water icing.
Spread the fruit icing mixture over the top of the cakes.

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.

Apricot + figtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together97 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Almond + figtop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together519 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Apricot + almondtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together852 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Pound cake mixture: Forms the tender, dense crumb that the topping rests on.
French fruit glace: Adds sweetness, chewy texture and bright color to the topping.
Water icing: Binds the chopped fruit and spreads into a thin, sweet glaze.

“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.