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Dessert

Fig Layer Cake

A layered cake made with a butter, sugar, egg white batter and a fig paste filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Fig Layer 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 cake batter

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

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

  3. Add the egg whites and mix well.

  4. Gradually add the flour, milk, and baking powder, mixing until smooth.

  5. Divide the batter into layers.

Bake and make the fig paste

  1. Bake the layers until golden.

  2. For the fig paste, chop the figs and cook them with 1 cup of water and ½ cup of sugar until soft and smooth.

  3. Mix in the juice of a lemon (optional).

  4. Use stoned raisins for part of the figs (optional).

Assemble

  1. Fill the baked layers with the fig paste.

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

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

  3. Fig + raisintop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

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

  4. Milk + figtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,026 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Fig + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air, giving the cake a light, tender crumb.
Egg whites
Add structure and help the batter hold its shape as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the layers once baked.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the layers rise and lighten.
Figs
Cooked down to a soft paste that adds sweetness and moisture to the filling.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, egg, flour, milk, fig, raisin):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, flour, milk, fig, raisin. 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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