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Dessert

Spice Cake

A buttery cake flavored with lemon, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Spice Cake

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Spice 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 the batter

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

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the spices, beaten yolks of the eggs, lemon juice, and lemon rind.

  4. Mix in part of the flour that has been sifted with baking powder and salt.

  5. Stir in the milk, then add the remaining flour.

  6. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased pan and bake until the cake leaves the sides of the pan.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Nutmeg + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Lemon + allspicetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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, adding tenderness and a rich flavour to the crumb.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and emulsify the batter; whites, whipped and folded in, lighten the structure.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure once its gluten and starches set in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Sugar
Creams with butter for aeration and adds sweetness and gentle browning.

The step that matters

Folding in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Whites hold the air that lightens the cake. Folding gently with a spatula keeps that air in; vigorous stirring deflates the batter and yields a dense cake.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, milk, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice. 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.

More spice cake recipes

Raisin 13Molasses 12Eggless 6Chocolate 5Golden 4Christmas 3 See all 307 →

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