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Dessert

Wedding Cake

A sweet cake made with flour, sugar, butter, eggs, spices, molasses, dried fruit, and almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Wedding Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grease and line the baking pans with paper.

Make the batter

  1. Mix the brown sugar and butter together by hand.

  2. Break and add the eggs one at a time.

  3. Stir in the mixed spices and molasses.

  4. Add the fruit and flour alternately, mixing well.

  5. If needed, add more flour based on the size of the eggs and the amount of flour used.

Bake

  1. Bake in a baker's oven.

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

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

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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 and richness as they are beaten in.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the batter together as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness, and creams with the sugar to trap air.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and gives the cake its deep flavour and colour.
Raisins
Add moisture, chewiness and sweetness throughout the cake.
Molasses
Adds moisture, dark colour and a rich, slightly bitter sweetness.

The step that matters

Adding more flour. Eggs vary in size and the flour already used affects how thick the batter is. Adding flour only as needed keeps the batter at the right consistency so the cake bakes evenly and does not turn dense or heavy.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, raisin, coffee, molasses, 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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