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Dessert

Little Spice Cakes

A small almond cake flavored with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and lemon rind, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Little Spice Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Pound the almonds and mix them with the sugar.

  2. Add the cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, lemon rind, egg yolks, and flour.

  3. Beat the mixture well.

  4. Refrigerate for 1 hour.

  5. Roll out the dough to the thickness of two straws.

  6. Cut the dough into shapes.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake on a floured baking sheet at 300°F (150°C) until golden.

  2. Let the cakes cool.

  3. Cover with icing.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Almond + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Almond + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Almonds
Provide the main body and rich, nutty flavor of the cakes.
Flour
Gives the dough structure as its starch and proteins set during baking.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the dough together.
Castor sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown as they bake.
Lemon rind
Adds bright aroma that lifts the warm spices.

The step that matters

Roll the dough to an even thickness. Rolling to a consistent thickness, here about two straws, makes the cakes bake evenly. Thin spots over-brown and dry out, while thick spots stay doughy in the centre.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (almond, cinnamon, nutmeg, flour, sugar, clove, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, cinnamon, nutmeg, flour, sugar, clove, egg. 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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