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Dessert

Cherry Layer Cake

A layered cake made with cherries, butter, flour, and sugar, topped with a cherry icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cherry 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 the batter

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

  2. In a bowl, mix flour, baking powder, and salt.

  3. In another bowl, cream butter.

  4. Add eggs, cherries, and water to the butter.

  5. Combine the wet and dry ingredients. Mix well.

Bake and ice

  1. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans.

  2. Bake until golden.

  3. For the icing, boil sugar, water, and cherry juice until it strings.

  4. Stir the icing until it grains fine.

  5. Spread between the cake layers.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + cherrytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it sets.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the batter bind and set in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour in the batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the icing and helps it set to a smooth texture when stirred.
Cherries
Add fruit flavour and moisture to the batter.

The step that matters

Stirring the icing until it grains fine. Sugar syrup that is boiled to the right point and then stirred while cooling recrystallises into small crystals, giving a smooth, spreadable icing rather than a gritty or hard one.

Swap the cherry

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

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

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