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Dessert

Scotch Seed Cake

A light-bread dough cake flavored with caraway seeds, sugar, butter, eggs, and flour, baked at 300°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Scotch Seed Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slack oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the batter

  1. Weigh out the dough at 7 AM and place it with the butter and sugar in a warm place.

  2. At about 9 AM, mix everything together and beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the caraway seeds.

  3. Let the mixture stand for 30 minutes until smooth, then add the flour and beat for 10 minutes.

Bake

  1. Pour the stiff batter into two buttered cake molds.

  2. Allow to rise for about 1 hour.

  3. Bake in a slack oven at 300 °F (150 °C) for less than 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Light-bread dough
Provides the leavening base that makes the cake rise during its long proof.
Eggs
Add structure and richness as they set in the baked crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and rich flavour in the crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps brown the crust during baking.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the cake its structure.

The step that matters

Beating the batter after adding the flour. Beating for a full 10 minutes develops gluten for structure, so the batter must be stiff and beaten long enough without overmixing to avoid a tough crumb.

“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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