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Dessert

Jumble Cake

A cake made with roasted almonds, milk, baking soda, sugar, butter, egg yolks, flour, and crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Jumble Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grind the almonds with the milk.

  2. Add the baking soda.

  3. Sift the crumbs through a coarse flour sieve.

Make the cake

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Gradually add the egg yolks.

  3. Mix in the ground almonds.

  4. Add the flour and then the fine crumbs.

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. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Egg yolks add richness and help bind the batter into a tender crumb.
Butter
Creamed butter traps air and adds fat for a soft, rich texture.
Flour
Flour gives the cake its main structure once it sets in the oven.
Almonds
Ground almonds add moisture, fat and a nutty flavour to the crumb.
Sugar
Sugar creams with the butter to aerate the batter and adds sweetness.
Baking soda
Baking soda reacts with the batter to help it rise and lighten.

The step that matters

Cream the butter and sugar together. Beating butter and sugar traps air in the fat, which gives the batter lift. If the butter is too cold or the mixing too brief, the cake can turn out dense.

“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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