Skip to main content
Dessert

Apple Sauce Cake

A moist cake made with apple sauce, flour, sugar, spices, raisins, nuts, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Apple Sauce Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

Make the batter

  1. Sift together the flour, baking soda, sugar, cloves, cocoa powder, cinnamon, and cornstarch.

  2. Stir the sifted mixture into the apple sauce until well combined.

  3. Fold in the floured raisins, chopped nuts, and melted butter.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a shallow pan and bake until set.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Cinnamon + appletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Clove + appletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it sets.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic apple sauce to lift and lighten the batter.
Apple sauce
Adds moisture and tenderness, and supplies the base of the batter.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving a softer crumb and fuller flavour.
Cocoa powder
Adds chocolate flavour and a deeper colour to the cake.
Cornstarch
Softens the flour's gluten, producing a more tender crumb.

The step that matters

Pour the batter into a shallow pan and bake until set. The batter is loose and wet, so it must bake until the starches and flour set. Pulling it early leaves a gummy centre, while overbaking dries the cake out.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, clove, cocoa powder, cinnamon, sauce, raisin):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, clove, cocoa powder, cinnamon, sauce, raisin. 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

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipes