Skip to main content
Dessert

Spice Nut Cake

A cake made with sugar, butter, eggs, sour milk, baking soda, walnuts, spices, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spice Nut 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.

Prepare

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

Make the batter

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

  2. Add the eggs and sour milk, mixing well.

  3. Stir in the baking soda, walnuts, and spices.

  4. Add enough flour to stiffen the batter.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour the batter into cake pans and bake until done.

  2. Ice the cake if desired.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Walnut + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Walnut + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the cake sets in the oven.
Butter
Creams with the sugar to trap air and adds richness and tenderness.
Sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that makes the cake rise.
English walnuts
Add texture, fat and a toasty, nutty flavor throughout the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender crumb when creamed with butter.

The step that matters

Add enough flour to stiffen the batter. Too little flour leaves the batter too loose to hold its structure, while too much makes the cake dense and dry. Adding flour gradually until the batter is stiff but still pourable gives a balanced crumb.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, egg, milk, cinnamon, allspice, clove):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutthe original
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Pistachiofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, milk, cinnamon, allspice, clove. 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.

You might also like

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesClove CakeClove Cake53 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes