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Dessert

Wedding Cake

A fruit-laden wedding cake made with butter, sugar, flour, spices, dried fruits, candied citrus, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 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 ↓

Wedding 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.

Prepare the batter

  1. Cream the butter with part of the sugar.

  2. Beat the egg yolks with the remaining sugar.

  3. Combine the butter and yolk mixtures, then add the orange juice, lemon juice, and grated lemon rind.

  4. In a separate bowl, mix the flour with the spices and dredge the small fruits.

  5. Stir the flour mixture into the batter, then fold in the chopped nut meats, citron, and thinly cut orange peel.

  6. Fold in the well-beaten egg whites.

Bake and age

  1. Bake in one or two oblong pans lined with three layers of buttered paper at 350°F (175°C).

  2. For best flavor, bake two to three weeks before serving.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cinnamon + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  5. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with sugar to form a rich, tender crumb structure.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the batter, while whites are folded in to lighten the crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the heavy fruit and nuts together.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps tenderise the crumb when creamed with butter.
Orange juice
Adds moisture and bright acidity that balances the sweetness of the dried fruit.

The step that matters

Folding in the well-beaten egg whites. Whites hold air that lightens the heavy fruit batter; overmixing or deflating them makes the cake dense and heavy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, nutmeg, butter, cinnamon, flour, raisin, almond):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, nutmeg, butter, cinnamon, flour, raisin, almond. 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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