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Dessert

Coffee Fruit Cake

A dense cake made with butter, sugar, molasses, coffee, milk, egg yolks, raisins, currants, citron, figs, and browned flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Coffee Fruit Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar.

  3. Add the molasses, strong coffee, cream or milk, and egg yolks; mix well.

Make the batter

  1. In a separate bowl, sift the cooled browned flour with baking powder, salt, and spices.

  2. Flour the fruit well before adding it to the batter.

  3. Combine the flour mixture with the wet ingredients and beat thoroughly.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared cake pan and bake for 4 to 5 hours.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Molasses + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with sugar to form a tender, rich crumb structure.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter.
Browned flour
Provides the structure of the cake and a toasty, nutty flavor.
Baking powder
Releases gas to lift the heavy batter as it bakes.
Molasses
Adds moisture, dark color, and deep sweetness.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Flour the fruit well before adding it to the batter. Coating the fruit in flour helps it stay suspended in the thick batter instead of sinking to the bottom during the long bake.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, molasses, coffee, cream, 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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