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Dessert

Raspberry Venice Cake

A light cake with raspberry jam filling and Royal icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Raspberry Venice Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs and sugar until very light.

  2. Add the butter, dissolved into a cream, and stir in the flour lightly.

  3. Spread the mixture in a square-edged tin about ½ inch thick.

  4. Bake until done, then turn out to cool.

Assemble and finish

  1. Split the cake with a sharp knife and spread with raspberry jam.

  2. Close the cake like a sandwich and spread the top with Royal Icing.

  3. Cut into squares or lengths 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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + raspberrytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Eggs
Whipped with sugar to trap air, giving the cake its light, airy structure.
Flour
Provides the set structure that holds the cake together once baked.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender crumb to the cake.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps hold air when beaten with the eggs.
Raspberry jam
Adds fruit sweetness and moisture between the cake layers.

The step that matters

Beat the eggs and sugar until very light. Whisking air into the eggs and sugar creates the foam that makes the cake light. Under-beating leaves it dense, while stirring the flour too hard can knock out that air.

Swap the raspberry

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Raspberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, 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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