Skip to main content
Dessert

To Make a Cake Without Butter

A cake made with eggs, sugar, almonds, lemon, and flour, baked without butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
To Make a Cake Without Butter

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 Make a Cake Without Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs for half an hour.

  2. Gradually add the sifted sugar and beat for another half hour.

  3. Mix in the pounded almonds, orange flower water, grated lemon rind, and lemon juice.

  4. Continue beating until the oven is ready.

Bake

  1. Just before placing in the oven, fold in the warm flour.

  2. Grease a cake pan with butter and bake for 1.5 hours.

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. 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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whipped to trap air, giving the cake its structure and lift.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the cake and stabilises the beaten eggs as it dissolves into them.
Sweet almonds
Add richness, moisture and a nutty flavour to the crumb.
Fine flour
Sets during baking, forming the cake's final structure around the air bubbles.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Fold in the warm flour gently, just before baking. Flour is added without the egg foam so the air bubbles stay intact. Vigorous stirring knocks out the air and the cake bakes up dense instead of light.

Swap the orange

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

  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. 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