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Dessert

Albany Cake

A buttery cake with sugar, eggs, flour, nutmeg, brandy, baking soda, and milk, baked until light brown.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Albany 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.

Make the dough

  1. Beat together the butter and sugar until creamy.

  2. Whisk the eggs until frothy, then stir the eggs into the butter and sugar mixture.

  3. Add the flour, nutmeg, and brandy, mixing well.

  4. Dissolve the baking soda in ½ cup of milk and add it to the mixture.

  5. Add more milk as needed to form a dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough.

  2. Cut it into shapes using a cutter or the edge of a small tumbler.

  3. Bake on tins in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until light brown.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps give it a light structure.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, binding the dough together.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake's shape as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the dough to help it rise and promotes browning.

The step that matters

Adding the milk a little at a time. Too much liquid makes the dough sticky and hard to roll and cut, while too little leaves it crumbly. Add milk gradually and stop once the dough just holds together.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, egg, flour, brandy, milk):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Clovefits less well
  4. Allspicefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, flour, brandy, milk. 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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