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Baking

Spice Cake

A baked cake made with rice flour, buckwheat flour, fat, sugar, syrup, eggs, milk, vanilla, salt, baking powder, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Spice Cake

Why it works: Flour and buckwheat work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 660 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Spice Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

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

  2. Cream the fat, sugar, and egg yolks together.

  3. Add the syrup and mix well.

  4. Sift together the dry ingredients.

  5. Alternately add the liquid and dry ingredients to the mixture.

  6. Add the vanilla and fold in the beaten egg whites.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a loaf pan and bake for 1 hour.

  2. After 20 minutes, increase the oven temperature to 400°F (200°C).

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + buckwheattop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together660 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Rice + buckwheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice flour
Provides the main structure of the cake crumb.
Buckwheat flour
Adds structure and a deeper, earthy flavour to the crumb.
Fat
Tenderises the crumb and carries the spices' aroma.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and emulsify, while beaten whites lighten and help the cake rise.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, causing the cake to rise.
Syrup
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the crust brown.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air bubbles in the whites intact. Overmixing deflates the batter, leaving a denser cake with less lift.

Swap the buckwheat

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, flour, sugar, syrup, egg, milk, vanilla):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Buckwheatthe original
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Turmericfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, flour, sugar, syrup, egg, milk, vanilla. 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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