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Dessert

Albany Cake

A sweet cake made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, nutmeg, brandy, baking soda, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Albany Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat together the butter and sugar until creamy.

  2. Whisk the eggs until frothy and stir them into the butter and sugar mixture.

  3. Add the flour, nutmeg, and brandy, mixing well.

  4. Dissolve the baking soda in ½ cup of milk and add it to the mixture.

  5. Add more milk as needed to form a dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough and cut it into shapes using a cutter or the edge of a small tumbler.

  2. Bake on tins until light brown.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Creams with sugar to create a rich, tender texture and flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown while creaming aerates the dough.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the dough.
Baking soda
Reacts with the milk to lift and lighten the cake.
Milk
Moistens the dry ingredients so they form a workable dough.

The step that matters

Dissolve the baking soda in the milk. Baking soda must be fully dissolved so it reacts evenly through the dough; undissolved pockets can leave bitter spots or uneven rising.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Clovefits less well
  4. Allspicefits less well

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