Skip to main content
Dessert

To Wake a Cake Without Butter

A cake made from eggs, powdered sugar, sweet almonds, orange flower water, lemon rind and juice, and warm dry flour, baked without butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

To Wake a Cake Without Butter

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the batter

  1. Separate the egg whites and yolks, and beat them for half an hour.

  2. Gradually add the powdered sugar while continuing to beat for another hour.

  3. Finely grind the sweet almonds and mix with orange flower water, lemon rind, and lemon juice.

  4. Combine the almond mixture with the egg mixture, and keep beating until the oven is ready.

Bake

  1. Just before baking, fold in the warm dry flour gently.

  2. Grease a hoop with butter and pour in the batter.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for about an hour.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Almond + buttertop 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
Whipped whites and yolks trap air, giving the cake its light, risen structure.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps stabilise the whipped egg foam.
Sweet almonds
Ground almonds add moisture, richness and a nutty flavour to the crumb.
Warm dry flour
Provides the starch that sets the structure as the cake bakes.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Fold in the flour gently just before baking. Folding rather than stirring keeps the air whipped into the eggs. Overmixing once the flour is added knocks out air and makes the cake dense.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

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

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes