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Dessert

Honey Apple Cake

A cake made with soaked dried apples, honey, spices, sugar, butter, eggs, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Honey Apple Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Soak the dried apples overnight.

  2. Chop the apples slightly and simmer them in honey for 2 hours.

Make the batter

  1. Add the baking soda, ground cloves, ground cinnamon, sugar, melted butter, eggs, powdered lemon or orange peel, and ground ginger.

  2. Mix well and add enough flour to create a stiff batter.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into cake pans and bake.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Apple + honeytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together569 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Dried apples
Provide the fruit body and moisture that give the cake its character.
Honey
Sweetens and moistens the apples while they simmer, adding depth and keeping the cake tender.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the cake sets in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender crumb.
Flour
Builds the cake's structure so the stiff batter holds together when baked.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic honey and fruit to leaven the cake and aid browning.

The step that matters

Simmer the apples in honey. Simmering for a long time softens the apples and thickens the honey. If it is too short, the pieces stay firm and the batter gets uneven moisture, and if it runs too hot, the honey can scorch.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, honey, clove, cinnamon, sugar, butter, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, honey, clove, cinnamon, sugar, butter, egg. 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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