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Dessert

Plum Cake, Rich, Icing for

A dense almond cake finished with a stiff egg white icing flavored with orange flower water and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Plum Cake, Rich, Icing for

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the almond paste

  1. Blanch and peel the almonds.

  2. Pound the almonds in a mortar to a smooth paste, adding a few drops of orange-flower water to prevent oiling.

  3. Mix in the powdered sugar and enough egg white to form a soft paste.

Assemble and ice the cake

  1. Bake the cake and let it cool.

  2. Spread the almond paste smoothly over the cooled cake.

  3. To make the sugar icing, mix the egg whites with the icing sugar to form a stiff paste, adding lemon juice as needed.

  4. Spread the icing evenly over the cake using hands dipped in cold water.

  5. Place the cake in a cool oven until the icing is dry and hard.

  6. Decorate 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Almonds
Pounded into a paste that forms the rich, moist almond layer of the cake.
Powdered loaf sugar
Sweetens the almond paste and helps it hold together as a soft paste.
Egg white
Binds the powdered sugar and almonds into a workable paste.
Icing sugar
Forms the sweet icing that sets hard on the surface of the cake.
Egg whites
Whipped into the icing sugar to give it a stiff structure that dries firm.

The step that matters

Pound the almonds to a smooth paste. Pounding the almonds fine and adding a few drops of orange-flower water helps prevent the paste from releasing its oil, which would make it greasy and uneven.

“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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