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Dessert

Berry Cake

A sweet cake made with sugar, flour, butter, cinnamon, cloves, eggs, blackberry jam, baking powder, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Berry Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cream the butter with the sugar.

  2. Add the eggs and beat thoroughly.

  3. Stir in the blackberry jam and water.

  4. Mix in the sifted dry ingredients.

  5. Bake in 2 layers and frost with Boiled Frosting.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + blackberrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together212 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Cinnamon + blackberrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together362 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Forms the cake's structure as its proteins and starches set during baking.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps give a tender crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor when creamed with the sugar.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.
Blackberry jam
Supplies fruit flavor, sweetness and moisture to the batter.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the batter, helping the cake rise.

The step that matters

Mixing in the sifted dry ingredients. Once flour meets liquid, gluten begins to form. Stirring only until the flour is combined keeps the cake tender rather than tough and dense.

Swap the blackberry

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

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

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