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Dessert

Spice Cakes

A spiced cake made with butter, sugar, molasses, water, spices, baking soda, nutmeg, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Spice Cakes

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg 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 ↓

Spice Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix melted butter, sugar, molasses, and water until well combined.

  3. Add cinnamon, ground coriander, ground caraway, ginger, baking soda, and grated nutmeg. Mix well.

  4. Gradually add flour until the dough is manageable.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the dough thin and cut into desired shapes.

  2. Bake in the preheated oven until golden brown.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Coriander + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Caraway + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together200 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Melted butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the dough.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps it brown during baking.
Molasses
Adds moisture, dark color, and a deep sweet flavor.
Baking soda
Reacts to lift and lighten the dough as it bakes.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together and lets it be rolled.

The step that matters

Adding flour gradually. Adding flour in small amounts lets you stop when the dough is manageable. Too much flour makes the dough dry and tough, while too little leaves it sticky and hard to roll.

Swap the coriander

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, molasses, cinnamon, caraway, ginger, nutmeg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, molasses, cinnamon, caraway, ginger, 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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