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Dessert

Ribbon Cake

A layered cake made with eggs, butter, sugar, milk, flour, raisins, currants, citron, spices, and jelly or egg and sugar for filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Ribbon Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg whites and yolks separately.

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together until light.

  3. Dissolve the baking soda in the milk and add it to the mixture along with the cream of tartar and flour. Beat well and divide the batter into three equal portions.

  4. To one portion, add the egg whites; to another, add the egg yolks; to the third, add the raisins, currants, citron, and spices.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake each portion separately.

  2. Once baked, layer the cakes with jelly or egg and sugar in between.

  3. Frost the cake and cut it into slices, ensuring the fruit layer is in the center.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  5. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whites and yolks are added separately to lighten and enrich the layers' structure and colour.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air, giving the cake a tender, fine crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and, creamed with butter, helps hold air for a light texture.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps the flour form a smooth, even batter.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake layers together.
Baking soda
Reacts with the cream of tartar to produce gas that makes the layers rise.

The step that matters

Bake each portion separately. Each batter has different added ingredients and needs its own pan so the layers bake evenly and keep their distinct colours and textures; the leavening reacts quickly, so batter should be baked promptly after mixing.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, sugar, milk, cream, flour, raisin):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, sugar, milk, cream, flour, 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.

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