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Dessert

Fruit Layer Cake

A layered cake made with butter, sugar, sour milk, eggs, cinnamon, raisins, currants, citron, baking soda, flour, and white icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 Layer 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

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

Make the batter

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

  2. Add the sour milk and eggs, mixing well.

  3. Stir in the cinnamon, raisins, currants, chopped citron, and baking soda.

  4. Gradually add flour until the batter is stiff.

Bake and assemble

  1. Divide the batter into layers and bake until golden.

  2. Once cooled, layer the cakes with white icing.

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

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

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

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

  4. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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 and add richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Sugar
Creams with butter for a light texture and adds sweetness and browning.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and moisture as the cake sets.
Sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda to help the cake rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that leavens the batter.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the stiff batter and baked layers together.

The step that matters

Gradually add flour until the batter is stiff. Adding flour gradually lets you judge the batter's consistency, since too much flour makes the cake dry and dense while too little leaves it too loose to hold its layers.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

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