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Dessert

German Coffee Cake

A yeast-leavened cake with a buttery batter, eggs, and a sweet prune, cinnamon, and lemon peel topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

German Coffee Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Dissolve the yeast in lukewarm milk, add salt and brown sugar.

  2. Sift 1 cup of flour into a bowl, add the milk and yeast mixture, stir until smooth, and let it rise in a warm place.

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the butter and powdered sugar.

  2. Add the whole eggs and egg yolks, then gradually mix in 2 cups of flour, alternating with the risen batter.

Prepare the filling and bake

  1. Mash the prunes until smooth, sweeten to taste, and add cinnamon and lemon peel.

  2. Pour the mixture into lined pie plates and bake immediately.

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 + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Yeast
Ferments the batter so it rises and becomes light and airy.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the cake set and bind.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich, soft crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Prunes
Supply moisture, sweetness and flavor to the filling.

The step that matters

Let the batter rise in a warm place. Yeast needs warmth to become active and produce gas; if the batter is too cold, it will rise slowly or not at all, leaving the cake dense.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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