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Water Melon Cake

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Water Melon 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.

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

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the flour, baking soda, and sour cream; mix well.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites and bitter almond extract.

  5. For the pink batter, repeat the process using pink sugar and the egg yolks.

  6. Soak the raisins in boiling water to swell, then dust with flour.

  7. Mix the raisins into the pink batter just before baking.

  8. Layer the two batters in a cake pan as desired.

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. Almond + raisintop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Almond + strawberrytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together433 recipes

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

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

Swap the strawberry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Strawberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, cream, egg, almond, raisin. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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