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Dessert

Dough Cake

A sweet bread-like cake made with dough, eggs, butter, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, raisins, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Dough 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.

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, mix the butter well with the dough.

  2. Add the sugar and cinnamon.

  3. Mix in the egg yolks.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

  5. Dissolve the baking soda in a little warm water.

  6. Add the dissolved baking soda to the mixture.

  7. Fold in the raisins.

Rise and bake

  1. Place the dough in pans and let it rise.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for about the same time as bread.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Dough
Forms the base of the cake and gives it a bread-like crumb.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, and the folded whites lighten the batter.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and carries flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps the crust brown while baking.
Cinnamon
Adds warm spice aroma to the cake.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites.. Beaten whites trap air that helps lift the batter. Folding gently keeps that air in, while vigorous stirring would deflate it and make the cake denser.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Lemonfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg. 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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