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Dessert

Brioche Cake

A sweet yeast bread cake made with sugar, toddy, eggs, butter, flour, and sweet wine, baked in a chimney mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Brioche Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Make a dough with sugar and enough toddy; work it well and let it rise covered for 2 hours.

  2. Beat the eggs with butter and salt for 15 minutes, then mix with the dough.

Fill and bake

  1. Place the mixture in a tin twice its size to bake.

  2. Infuse saffron in a little water, then add to the paste along with wine, currants, raisins, and sugar.

  3. Butter the mold and pour in the mixture; bake in a moderately hot oven (350°F) for about 1 hour.

  4. Check the cake after 1 hour and cover with paper to preserve color.

  5. Use a mold with a chimney in the middle.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

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

  4. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Sojee
Forms the main starchy body of the cake, giving it structure once baked.
Eggs
Add richness and help bind and set the crumb as the cake bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the crumb and carries flavour.
Madeira or sweet wine
Adds sweetness and aroma to the batter.
Fresh yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise before baking.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness to the batter.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, wine, raisin, sugar, cream, 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.

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