Skip to main content
Dessert

Black Cake

A dense fruit cake made with flour, butter, sugar, molasses, spices, raisins, currants, citron, nuts, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Black Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  2. Beat the eggs well and add them to the mixture.

  3. Stir in the flour, beating very hard until well combined.

  4. Dredge the fruit in some of the flour to prevent it from sinking.

  5. Add the dredged fruit to the batter and mix well.

Bake and cool

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared pan and bake at 300°F (150°C) for 3 hours.

  2. Leave the cake in the pan until it is completely cool.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat and tenderness, and creaming it with sugar traps air for a lighter crumb.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, creamed with butter, helps give the cake its light texture.
Raisins
Provide chewy fruit pieces and sweetness throughout the cake.
Currants
Add chewy fruit pieces and sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Dredging the fruit in flour. Heavy fruit sinks to the bottom of a thick batter during baking. Coating the pieces in flour gives them grip so they stay suspended through the cake.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, clove, sugar, ginger, butter, raisin, cinnamon. 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

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesGinger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipes