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Dessert

To Make Violet Cakes

A sweet cake made from violet leaves, lemon juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Make Violet Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the violets

  1. Remove leaves from the violets.

  2. Beat the violets with lemon juice in a mortar.

  3. Add double the weight of sugar to the violets.

Cook the mixture

  1. Place the mixture in a saucepan over low heat, stirring gently until the sugar dissolves.

  2. Avoid boiling to keep the color of the violets.

  3. Drop the mixture onto a china plate.

Store

  1. Store in a box with paper between each layer.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Violets
Provide the main flavour and the colour of the finished confection.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it dissolves and cools, helps the mixture set.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps beat the violets into a paste.

The step that matters

Heating gently without boiling. High heat breaks down the pigments in violets, dulling their colour. Gentle stirring over low heat dissolves the sugar fully so no grains remain to crystallise as the mixture cools.

“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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