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Dessert

Spice Cake

A spiced cake made with butter, sour cream, raisins, and spices baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Spice Cake

Why it works: Cinnamon and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,536 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Spice 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 the batter

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together the butter and brown sugar.

  3. Add the eggs and sour cream, mixing well.

  4. In another bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture.

  6. Roll the chopped raisins in a little extra flour and fold them into the batter.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake for 30-40 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure to the crumb as they set in the oven.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness by coating flour particles and carrying flavour.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and acidity, producing a tender, moist crumb.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cake brown as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour cream to produce gas that lightens the batter.

The step that matters

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture. Adding flour in portions and mixing gently keeps the batter smooth and limits gluten development, which would otherwise make the cake tough.

Swap the allspice

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicethe original
  4. Clovefits about as well

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

More spice cake recipes

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