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Dessert

Dough Cake

A sweet cake made with butter, sugar, dough, eggs, raisins, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,481 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Dough Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Mix and rise

  1. In a large bowl, combine butter, sugar, and raised dough.

  2. Mix with your hands until soft.

  3. Let the mixture rise until light.

Fold and bake

  1. Fold in the chopped raisins.

  2. Bake immediately.

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. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Butter + raisintop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,630 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat for a soft, tender crumb and rich flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown as it bakes.
Raised dough
Provides the rising structure and yeasty flavour that give the cake its lift.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping bind the mixture together.
Raisins
Add pockets of sweetness and a chewy texture throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Let the mixture rise until light. A raised dough gets its lift from gas trapped in its gluten network as it rises. Rising until light builds that airy structure, so the cake bakes up open rather than dense.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits about as well
  3. Raisinthe original
  4. Figfits about as well

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