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Dessert

Pressed Cake

A sweet cake made with sugar, butter, milk, flour, eggs, baking powder, molasses, and optional spices and fruit, baked in tins and pressed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Pressed 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. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter. Add the milk and eggs, mixing well.

  3. Gradually stir in the flour and baking powder until smooth.

  4. Divide the batter into three jelly tins.

Add the spice layer

  1. In one third of the batter, mix in spice, fruit, and molasses. Pour the spiced batter into the center tin.

Bake and press

  1. Bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

  2. Once baked, stack the cakes in one tin and cover with another tin. Press down with two heavy irons and let sit for several hours.

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

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

  2. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during baking.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cakes rise and become light.
Molasses
Adds moisture, dark color and a deep sweet flavor to the spiced layer.

The step that matters

Pressing the stacked cakes. Pressing while the cakes are still warm and soft compresses the crumb and helps them hold together. Pressing too early, before the cakes have cooled enough to firm up, can squash them out of shape. Letting them sit for several hours allows the moisture to even out through the layers.

“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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