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Dessert

Silver Wedding Cake

A fruit cake with flour, butter, currants, sugar, citron, orange peel, cherries, sultanas, almonds, eggs, milk, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Silver Wedding 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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. In a large bowl, mix all the dry ingredients together.

  3. In another bowl, beat the eggs separately.

Make the batter

  1. Add the milk, food coloring, essence of ratafia, lemon grated rind, and orange flower water to the eggs and mix well.

  2. Combine the wet and dry mixtures and beat for 20 minutes.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into a well-lined and greased cake tin.

  2. Bake for 6 hours or longer, until a skewer inserted comes out clean.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Orange + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

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

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

  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

Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake's crumb as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and rich flavour.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help set the structure as it bakes.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps tenderise the crumb while creaming with fat.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps form a smooth batter.
Sweet almonds, ground
Add richness, moisture and a nutty flavour to the crumb.

The step that matters

Beating the combined batter for 20 minutes. Long beating develops gluten in the flour, which can make the crumb tough, so the batter should be mixed only until combined. Overmixing after the eggs and dry ingredients meet can toughen the finished cake.

Swap the currant

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

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

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