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Dessert

Short Cake for Fruit

A quick, buttery cake topped with fruit and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter 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 ↓

Short Cake for Fruit

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 the batter

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Rub butter into flour until well combined.

  3. Powder baking soda finely with a knife and add to flour mixture.

  4. Quickly mix in sour cream until just combined.

  5. Divide batter into two pie pans or pour into a dripping pan.

Bake and fill

  1. Bake until golden brown.

  2. Once cooled, split the cake and fill with a thick layer of fruit and sugar.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Sour cream
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda to lift the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour cream's acidity to produce gas, helping the cake rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together once baked.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and carries flavor.

The step that matters

Quickly mix in sour cream until just combined. Once the acid in the sour cream meets the baking soda, gas starts forming, so the batter should go into the oven promptly. Overmixing develops gluten and makes the cake tough.

“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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