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Dessert

Brides Cake

A layered almond or pecan cake with lemon rind and mace, filled with a lemon butter mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Brides Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter after washing out the salt.

  2. Add the sugar, grated lemon rind, mace, yolks of eggs, and nuts.

  3. Stir for 30 minutes.

  4. Sift the flour with baking powder several times.

  5. Add the sifted flour and the beaten egg whites to the mixture.

Bake the layers

  1. Bake in layers until light brown.

Make the filling

  1. Wash the salt out of the butter.

  2. Melt the butter over low heat.

  3. Stir in the sugar, grated lemon rind, yolks of eggs, and lemon juice.

  4. Continue stirring until creamy.

  5. Remove from heat and stir for a while.

Assemble

  1. Spread the filling between the layers.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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 give the cake a tender, rich crumb and flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps give a fine, soft texture.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and help bind the batter; beaten whites lighten it and add structure.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Almonds or pecans
Add nutty flavor, richness and a tender, slightly moist texture to the crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the layers rise and become light.

The step that matters

Stir the filling over low heat. Egg yolks thicken gently when heated slowly while stirred constantly. Too much heat, or stopping to let it sit, can scramble the yolks and leave the filling grainy instead of smooth and creamy.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

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