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Dessert

Queen Cakes

A buttery currant cake made with flour, butter, sugar, eggs, cream, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Queen Cakes

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).

  2. Cream the butter until smooth.

Make the batter

  1. Sift in the flour, then add the sugar and currants, mixing well.

  2. Whisk the eggs and combine them with the cream and flavoring.

  3. Stir the egg mixture into the flour mixture.

  4. Add the baking soda and beat the batter well for 10 minutes.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into small buttered pans.

  2. Bake the cakes for 30 to 45 minutes.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and creaming it traps air for a lighter crumb.
Eggs
Add structure, moisture and richness to the batter as they set in the oven.
Baking soda
Reacts in the batter to produce gas, helping the cakes rise.
Pounded loaf sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps browning and a tender crumb.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the crumb.

The step that matters

Add the baking soda and beat the batter well for 10 minutes. Baking soda needs to be evenly distributed and beaten in so it releases gas throughout the batter. Uneven mixing can leave dense spots or holes, and the batter must be in the pans before the gas escapes.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, egg, cream, lemon. 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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