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Dessert

Dough Cake

A sweet cake made from bread dough, currants, sugar, eggs, and optional mixed spice, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Dough Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Place ½ quart of dough in a basin.

  2. Wash and dry 1 lb of currants, then pick them over to remove any stones.

Make the batter

  1. Add the currants and ½ lb of sugar to the dough.

  2. Optionally add ½ teaspoon of mixed spice.

  3. Break 2 eggs into the basin and beat all ingredients together well.

Bake and cool

  1. Grease a 1-quart tin with dripping.

  2. Pour the mixture into the greased tin.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for about 40 minutes, or until a clean knife comes out of the cake.

  4. Turn the cake out of the tin and lean it against a plate to cool.

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. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

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

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Egg + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Dough
Forms the base of the cake and gives it a bready, slightly chewy crumb.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help set the cake's structure as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown and soften.
Currants
Add sweetness and pockets of fruit flavour throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Bake until a clean knife comes out. Pulling the cake too early leaves the centre wet and under-set, while overbaking dries the crumb. A clean knife shows the centre has set.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Datesfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, egg, sugar. 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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