Skip to main content
Dessert

Eich Plum Cake

A rich, buttery cake made with flour, butter, eggs, sugar, mixed spice, currants, raisins, almonds, and candied peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Eich Plum 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

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Butter a piece of parchment paper and line a cake tin with it.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the butter until creamy.

  2. Stir in the well-beaten yolks of 12 eggs and the sugar.

  3. Add the mixed spice and finely chopped almonds.

  4. Gradually stir in the flour.

  5. Add the washed and dried currants, chopped raisins, and cut candied peel.

  6. Beat the mixture well after adding each ingredient.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into the prepared tin and bake for 2 hours or longer if needed.

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

Butter
Creams with the sugar to trap air, giving the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and emulsify the batter, helping it bind and set in the oven.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the batter brown and stay moist.
Currants
Dried fruit that adds chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.
Almonds
Add nutty flavour and a bit of texture to the crumb.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture well after adding each ingredient. Thorough beating incorporates the ingredients evenly and builds a smooth emulsion. Poor mixing can leave streaks or pockets, and the batter may then bake unevenly.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, flour, sugar, raisin, 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.

You might also like

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesAlmond Sponge CakeAlmond Sponge Cake26 recipesAlmond CustardAlmond Custard22 recipes