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Dessert

Coffee Cake

A sweet bread cake made from a bread sponge with raisins, sugar, butter, eggs, and spices, baked after rising.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Coffee Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Add some flour to the bread sponge.

  2. Stir in sugar, butter, raisins, nutmeg, and salt.

  3. Knead in enough flour to make a stiff dough.

  4. Let the dough rise until light.

Shape and bake

  1. Flatten the dough in baking tins.

  2. Brush the top with melted butter and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon.

  3. Let it rise again and then bake.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  5. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bread sponge
Provides the yeast-leavened base that makes the dough rise light.
Eggs
Add structure and richness to the dough.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour, and browns the top when brushed on.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown as it bakes.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit through the cake.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until light. The rise is what leavens the dough. If it is underproofed the cake will be dense, and if overproofed it may collapse or turn coarse in the oven.

“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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