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Dessert

Prince of Wales Cake

A spiced cake with raisins, allspice, cloves, and Karo syrup, baked and filled with custard and frosted.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Prince of Wales 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. In a bowl, cream together the brown sugar and butter.

  3. Add the cinnamon, Karo syrup, eggs, raisins, allspice, cloves, and baking soda; mix well.

  4. Stir in the buttermilk and flour until just combined.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans and bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

  2. Once cooled, fill the layers with custard filling and cover with white frosting.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cake brown and stay tender.
Butter
Creams with the sugar to add fat, richness, and a tender crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the cake sets in the oven.
Buttermilk or sour milk
Adds acidity that reacts with the baking soda to help the cake rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic buttermilk to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake as it bakes.

The step that matters

Stir in the buttermilk and flour until just combined. Once flour meets liquid, gluten begins to form. Overmixing makes the cake tough and dense, so stop as soon as no dry flour remains.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, cinnamon, syrup, egg, allspice, clove):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, cinnamon, syrup, egg, allspice, clove. 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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