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Dessert

Risen Cake

A yeast-leavened cake with raisins, butter, and brandy, sweetened with powdered sugar and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Risen 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.

Make the dough

  1. Sift together the flour, powdered sugar, cloves, mace, and ginger.

  2. Add the yeast and eggs, mixing well.

  3. If the mixture is too stiff, add a little milk.

  4. Prepare the mixture at night and let it rise.

Add the fruit and bake

  1. Once risen, knead in the butter and brandy.

  2. Mix in the stoned raisins thoroughly.

  3. Pour the mixture into a properly sized mold.

  4. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until thoroughly done.

  5. Allow the cake to cool completely in the mold before removing.

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Mace + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,152 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.
Yeast
Produces gas during the long rise, leavening the dough so the cake becomes light.
Flour
Forms the main structure that holds the risen crumb together after baking.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich mouthfeel in the finished cake.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the cake a tender, fine crumb.
Stoned raisins
Add concentrated sweetness, moisture, and chewy pieces throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Let the mixture rise fully before adding butter and brandy. Yeast needs time to produce gas and build the dough's structure. Adding fat and alcohol before the rise is complete can weaken gluten development and slow fermentation, leaving a dense cake.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

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