Skip to main content
Dessert

Seed Cake

A buttery cake flavored with caraway seeds, nutmeg, and cinnamon, made with egg yolks and whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Seed Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the butter and powdered sugar until smooth.

  2. Add the egg yolks one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  3. Stir in the caraway seeds, grated nutmeg, and cinnamon.

  4. Gradually mix in the flour and the stiffly beaten egg whites alternately.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared baking pan and bake at 300°F (150°C) until golden.

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. Caraway + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together200 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Caraway + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together188 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Caraway + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with the sugar to trap air and give a rich, tender crumb.
Egg yolks
Add fat and emulsifying power, enriching the batter's texture and richness.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in, they add lift and an airy, light structure.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake as it bakes.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the cake and dissolves smoothly into the creamed butter.

The step that matters

Folding in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Mixing the whites in alternately with the flour keeps the foam from collapsing, so the cake stays light. Overmixing knocks out air and makes the crumb dense.

Swap the caraway

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

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Carawaythe original

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

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