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Dessert

Cream Fruit Cake

A simple cake made with brown sugar, sour cream, currants, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cream Fruit 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).

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the brown sugar and sour cream until well combined.

  2. Stir in the currants and dissolved baking soda.

  3. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan.

Bake

  1. Bake for 30-40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center 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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes
  3. Cream + curranttop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,829 recipes

Sugar and currant barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Brown sugar
Adds sweetness, moisture and a deep caramel flavour and colour to the cake.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and tenderness, and its acidity reacts with the baking soda.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of sweet, concentrated fruit flavour throughout the cake.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour cream's acid to release gas that lifts and lightens the batter.

The step that matters

Stirring in the dissolved baking soda. Baking soda starts releasing gas as soon as it meets the acid in the sour cream. Mix it in promptly and get the batter into the pan and oven without delay, so the gas is trapped in the batter and the cake rises well.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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