Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit and Delicate Cake

A layered cake with fruit and delicate layers, made with sugar, flour, butter, eggs, sour milk, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Fruit and Delicate 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. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  3. Add the eggs, sour milk, and lemon flavoring; mix well.

  4. Stir in the baking soda and sifted flour until combined.

  5. Divide the batter; fill two jelly tins with half.

Make the fruit batter

  1. To the remaining batter, add raisins, currants, citron, molasses, brandy, cinnamon, mace, and cloves; mix well.

  2. Pour the fruit mixture into the other jelly tins.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

  2. Once cooled, spread jelly between the layers, alternating delicate and fruit layers.

  3. Frost the cake as desired.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and add richness and tender texture.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and moisture to the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender crumb when creamed with butter.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with baking soda to help the cake rise and adds tenderness.
Raisins
Add moisture and chewy sweetness to the fruit layers.

The step that matters

Stir in the baking soda and sifted flour until combined. Baking soda reacts with the acid in sour milk to produce gas for rising. Mixing only until combined keeps gluten development limited, so the cake stays tender rather than tough.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour, butter, egg, milk, lemon, raisin):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Blackberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, butter, egg, milk, lemon, raisin. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesMolasses CookiesMolasses Cookies96 recipes