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Dessert

Garfield Cake

A sweet cake with butter, powdered sugar, milk, eggs, flour, baking powder, walnuts, hickory nuts, raisins, and citron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Garfield 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.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and powdered sugar together.

  2. Add the sweet milk and mix well.

  3. Incorporate the egg yolks one at a time.

  4. Fold in the whipped egg whites.

  5. Sift the flour three times.

  6. Add the baking powder during the last sifting.

  7. Fold the flour mixture into the batter gently.

  8. Stir in the chopped walnuts, hickory nuts, raisins, and citron.

Bake and ice

  1. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until a toothpick comes out clean.

  3. Ice with boiled icing once cooled.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Walnut + nutstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

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

  4. Nuts + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and structure, and whipped whites lighten the batter for rise.
All-purpose flour
Forms the cake's structure once its starches set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises in the oven.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps the creamed butter hold air.

The step that matters

Folding in the whipped egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air whipped into the egg whites. Stirring or deflating the batter loses that air, leaving a denser cake with less rise.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, milk, egg, flour, walnut, raisin):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, milk, egg, flour, walnut, raisin. 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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