Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Cake

A dense cake made with butter, sugar, eggs, dried fruit, molasses, flour, spices, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Fruit Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

  3. Beat in the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  4. Stir in the currants, raisins, and citron.

  5. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and mace.

Make the batter

  1. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, alternating with the molasses.

  2. If the batter is too dry, moisten it with a little strong coffee.

  3. Pour the batter into two large loaf pans.

Bake

  1. Bake for about 1 hour or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air, giving the cake a light, tender crumb and rich flavor.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during baking.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake once baked.
Molasses
Adds moisture, deep sweetness and color to the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses's acidity to help the cake rise and brown.
Currants
Add chewy texture and concentrated fruit sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Adding the dry ingredients. Mixing flour in gradually and alternating with molasses keeps the batter smooth. Overmixing once flour is added develops gluten, which can make the cake tough and dense.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, raisin, flour, molasses, nutmeg. 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.

More fruit cake recipes

White 89Black 40Christmas 29Eggless 27Molasses 23Apple 17 See all 952 →

You might also like

Molasses CookiesMolasses Cookies96 recipesMolasses CakeMolasses Cake90 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipes