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Dessert

Apple Sauce Cake

A moist cake made with butter, sugar, egg, raisins, dates, flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and apple sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Apple Sauce 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).

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

  3. Add the beaten egg and mix well.

Make the batter

  1. Stir in the raisins, chopped dates, and warm apple sauce.

  2. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, and cinnamon.

  3. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, mixing until just combined.

  4. Pour the batter into a tube pan lined with buttered paper.

Bake

  1. Bake for 1 hour and 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Cinnamon + appletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  4. Dates + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together283 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and richness, creaming with sugar traps air that helps give a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps brown the crust while creaming aerates the batter.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure as it sets during baking.
Flour
Provides the main structure that sets as the cake bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic fruit and sauce to produce gas that lifts the cake.
Apple sauce
Adds moisture and tenderness, keeping the cake soft as it bakes.

The step that matters

Mixing the dry ingredients into the wet mixture. Mixing only until just combined keeps the batter tender. Overmixing develops gluten in the flour, which can make the cake tough and dense.

Swap the dates

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, egg, raisin, flour, cinnamon, apple):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Datesthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, raisin, flour, cinnamon, apple. 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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