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Dessert

Apricot Cakes

A dried fruit cake made from apricots, sugar, and water, simmered and dried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,630 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Apricot Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Scald and peel the apricots, then remove the stones.

  2. Beat the fruit into a pulp using a mortar.

Cook the paste

  1. Boil the sugar with the water, skimming it as needed.

  2. Add the apricot pulp to the sugar mixture and let it simmer for 15 minutes over low heat, stirring constantly.

Shape and dry

  1. Pour the mixture into shallow glasses and turn them out onto glass plates.

  2. Place the plates in a warm area, turning them once a day until dry.

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. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Apricots
Provide the fruit pulp that forms the body and flavour of the cakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the cakes and, as it cooks, helps the paste set firm when dried.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be boiled smoothly before the fruit is added.

The step that matters

Simmering the apricot pulp while stirring constantly. Sugar and fruit thicken as water evaporates and can scorch on the bottom of the pan over low heat. Constant stirring spreads the heat and keeps the paste from burning, while the long simmer drives off moisture so the cakes can set when dried.

“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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