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Dessert

Wedding Cake

A spiced cake made with sugar, butter, flour, citron, raisins, currants, eggs, rose-water, molasses, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Wedding 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. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  2. Add the eggs, leaving out 2 whites, and beat separately before mixing.

  3. Stir in the flour, then add the currants, raisins, and citron.

  4. Mix in the rose-water and molasses.

  5. Add the spices: nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and allspice.

Bake and ice

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared cake pan.

  2. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until a toothpick comes out clean.

  3. If icing the cake, apply the icing while the cake is warm.

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. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  3. Currant + rosetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together494 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat and tenderness, and creaming it with sugar traps air for a lighter crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the heavy fruit and batter together as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender texture when creamed with butter.
Molasses
Adds moisture, dark color, and a deep, slightly bitter sweetness.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Currantthe original
  4. Lemonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, flour, raisin, egg, rose, molasses. 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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