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Dessert

Coffee Cake

A yeasted bread cake with butter, sugar, eggs, and optional raisins, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Coffee 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.

Make the dough

  1. Prepare a sponge with 1 quart of bread sponge or mix 1 cake of dry yeast with 1 pint of milk or water.

  2. Let the mixture rise, then add flour and knead until smooth.

  3. Once light, mix in ½ cup sugar, ½ cup creamed butter, 2 or 3 beaten eggs, 1 teaspoon salt, a few gratings of nutmeg, and raisins if desired.

Shape and bake

  1. Flatten the dough in shallow baking tins and sprinkle with sugar, cinnamon, and small bits of butter.

  2. Let rise again and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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. Nutmeg + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and chew.
Eggs
Add richness and structure, helping the crumb set and hold its shape.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the dough and a golden finish on top.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, making the dough rise and become light.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until light before adding the rest. Yeast needs time to ferment and build gas in the dough. Adding the enriching ingredients before the dough is light can slow the rise and leave a dense cake.

Swap the raisin

The recipe marks raisin as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, flour, sugar, butter, egg, nutmeg):

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Lemonfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, flour, sugar, butter, egg, nutmeg. 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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