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Dessert

German Coffee Cake

A yeast-leavened cake with butter, sugar, eggs, raisins, and nuts, baked in buttered pans.

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 ↓

German Coffee Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Dissolve the yeast in lukewarm water.

  2. Add flour and beat well; let rise until nearly double in size.

  3. Mix in creamed butter, sugar, and beaten eggs.

  4. Stir in Sultana raisins and enough flour to form a stiff batter.

  5. Let rise again, then work down and spread in buttered pans to about ½ inch thick.

Top and bake

  1. When light, brush the top with melted butter, then sprinkle with sugar and chopped nuts.

  2. Optionally, cover with a paste made of confectioners' sugar and water.

  3. For sweet rusks, roll out the dough, cut into shapes, and add more sugar, raisins, and nuts.

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 + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Flour + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the cake its structure and holds the stiff batter.
Yeast
Ferments the dough so it rises and becomes light and airy.
Eggs
Add richness and help bind the batter for a tender crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for a softer, richer crumb and flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps the top brown lightly.
Sultana raisins
Add sweetness and moist pockets of fruit throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until nearly double before adding the rest. Yeast needs time to build gas and structure in the first rise. Adding the other ingredients too early or skipping the rise leaves the cake dense, because the dough never gets the lift it needs.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, egg, 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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