Skip to main content
Dessert

Loaf Cake

A sweet loaf cake with raisins, butter, sugar, and spices, baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon 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 ↓

Loaf 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. Dissolve the baking soda in the milk.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the butter and sugar into the light dough using your hands.

  2. Add the egg, grated nutmeg, cinnamon, and dissolved baking soda mixture.

  3. Flour the chopped raisins and fold them into the batter.

  4. If using wine, add a little extra flour if the batter seems too thin.

  5. Mix thoroughly and let the batter rise for about an hour or until it looks light.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased loaf pan and bake for 30-40 minutes or until golden 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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

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

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

  5. Cinnamon + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Light dough
Forms the base structure of the cake and gives it its bulk.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender texture and rich flavour.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure and moisture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the batter to help it rise and lighten.

The step that matters

Let the batter rise until light. Baking soda and the dough's yeast-free lift need time to aerate the batter. Under-rising leaves a dense loaf, while the batter should look visibly lighter before it goes into the pan.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Lemonfits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, nutmeg, cinnamon, wine, 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.

More loaf cake recipes

Chocolate 35French 25Raisin 19Indian 17Coconut 16Plain 13 See all 114 →

You might also like

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes