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Dessert

Lady Baltimore Cake

A moist, buttery cake with raisins and walnuts, topped with a sweet rose and vanilla icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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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 ↓

Lady Baltimore Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the eggs one at a time, beating vigorously after each addition.

  3. Add half of the flour, then the water, and then the remaining flour.

  4. Mix well and add the baking powder.

Make the icing and filling

  1. Mix the chopped raisins and broken walnuts with the boiled icing.

  2. Spread the mixture between the cakes, saving some for the top.

  3. Boil 2 cups of sugar and 1 cup of water until the syrup spins like glass.

  4. Pour the hot syrup into the beaten egg whites and beat until thick.

  5. Fold in the nuts and raisins.

  6. Flavor the cake with almond extract and the icing with vanilla and rose extracts.

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. Walnut + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  4. Almond + vanillatop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,961 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Builds the cake's structure as its proteins set during baking.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and carries flavor through the crumb.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, and help bind the batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the crumb a tender texture.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to help the cake rise.
Egg whites
Whipped with hot syrup to form a stable, thick icing foam.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup until it spins like glass. The syrup must be cooked to a high sugar concentration to set firmly. Pouring it hot into beaten egg whites cooks the whites and stabilizes the foam, so the icing thickens rather than staying runny.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Brazil nutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

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