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Dessert

Gingerbread Cake

A moist gingerbread cake with raisins, almonds, and treacle baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin 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 ↓

Gingerbread 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. In a large bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, mixed spice, raisins, and almonds together.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the butter, sugar, and treacle, and bring to a boil.

  3. Beat the eggs and gradually pour the boiling mixture into them, stirring vigorously.

  4. Pour the egg mixture into the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a buttered cake tin and bake at 350°F (175°C) for about 1 hour.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,242 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

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 as they set in the oven.
Flour
Provides the main structure of the cake as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown during baking.
Treacle
Adds moisture, deep sweetness and a dark color to the cake.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic treacle to help the cake rise.

The step that matters

Pouring the boiling mixture into the eggs. Adding boiling syrup too quickly, or without constant stirring, can scramble the eggs. Stirring vigorously while pouring gradually blends them smoothly into the batter.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

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