Skip to main content
Dessert

Dried Apple Cake

A moist cake made with soaked dried apples, molasses, eggs, butter, sour cream, sugar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Dried Apple Cake

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Dried Apple 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.

Prepare the apples

  1. Stew the chopped dried apples in molasses until well cooked.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the eggs, butter, sour cream, sugar, salt, and baking soda.

  2. Stir in enough flour to form a batter.

  3. Add the cooked apples and spices to the batter and mix well.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased baking pan.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until a toothpick 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.

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

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

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Molasses + sugartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Dried apples
Provide the fruit bulk and moisture, softening into the cake as they stew.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color and a deep flavor while keeping the crumb moist.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help give the cake its structure as it sets.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness through fat in the crumb.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and acidity that keeps the cake tender.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour cream and molasses to lift the batter.

The step that matters

Stew the apples until well cooked. Dried apples stay tough and dense if not fully softened, and they cannot soften much once baked into the batter. Cooking them in molasses first makes them tender and lets the flavor spread through the cake.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, egg, butter, cream, sugar, 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

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesMolasses CookiesMolasses Cookies96 recipesMolasses CakeMolasses Cake90 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipes