Skip to main content
Dessert

Madeira Cake

A light, buttery cake made with margarine, sugar, egg, flour, baking powder, topped with citron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Madeira 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).

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, cream together the margarine and sugar.

  2. Add the egg and beat until thoroughly combined.

  3. Sift in the flour and baking powder, and mix well.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a lined and greased cake tin.

  2. Place a strip of citron on top.

  3. Bake for about 40 minutes or 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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Margarine
Creaming with sugar traps air and gives the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a light texture when creamed with fat.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure and moisture to the crumb.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.

The step that matters

Sift in the flour and baking powder, and mix well. Mixing too vigorously once flour is added develops gluten and can make the cake tough. Mix only until combined so the crumb stays tender.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes