Skip to main content
Dessert

Soft Gingerbread

A moist gingerbread cake flavored with lemon rind and juice, ground ginger, and baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Soft Gingerbread

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

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

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the milk, cream of tartar, baking soda, ginger, lemon rind, and lemon juice. Mix well.

  3. Gradually add flour until the batter is as stiff as pound cake.

  4. Pour the batter into shallow pans.

Bake

  1. Bake for 1 hour and 15 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.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  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

Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown and stay tender.
Butter
Adds fat, richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps form a soft batter with the flour.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter and reacts with baking soda to help the cake rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas for rising and browning.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake as it bakes.

The step that matters

Gradually add flour until the batter is as stiff as pound cake. Adding flour gradually lets you judge the batter's stiffness. Too much flour makes the cake dry and dense, while too little leaves it too loose to hold its structure.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, milk, cream, flour, 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesGinger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes