Skip to main content
Dessert

Queen Cake

A buttery cake flavored with rose water and studded with currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Queen Cake

Why it works: Rose and currant work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 494 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Queen Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the butter to a cream with rose water.

  2. Mix in the flour and sifted sugar until well combined.

  3. Fold in the currants.

  4. Pour the batter into a baking pan.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

  2. Dredge with white sugar before serving.

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. Rose + curranttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together494 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 rich, tender crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Sifted sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps tenderize the crumb when creamed with butter.
Currants
Add tart, chewy bursts of fruit flavour throughout the cake.
Rose water
Adds a delicate floral aroma that flavours the butter and batter.

The step that matters

Beat the butter to a cream. Beating butter with sugar traps air bubbles that expand in the oven and lighten the cake. Under-beaten butter gives a dense crumb, so the butter should look pale and fluffy before the flour goes in.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sugar, rose. 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

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipes