Skip to main content
Dessert

White Plum Cake

A cake made with flour, sugar, butter, eggs, currants, almonds, candied lemon, brandy, and orange‑flower water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,115 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

White Plum Cake

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 the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Beat the butter until it has a cream consistency.

  3. Add the sugar and mix well.

  4. Whisk the egg whites for 30 minutes.

  5. Combine the egg whites with the sugar and butter mixture.

  6. Beat the egg yolks for 30 minutes and mix them with the egg whites.

  7. Gradually add the flour just before the oven is ready.

  8. Lightly mix in the currants, almonds, candied lemon, brandy, and orange-flower water.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared cake pan and bake for 2 ½ hours.

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. Nutmeg + almondtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whisked whites and beaten yolks trap air and build the cake's light, structured crumb.
All-purpose flour
Its gluten and starch set during baking to form the cake's main structure.
Unsalted butter
Creamed with sugar to hold air and give the cake a tender, rich texture.
Granulated sugar
Creamed with butter for sweetness and to help trap air in the batter.
Currants
Add fruit sweetness and chewy pockets throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Gradually add the flour just before the oven is ready. Mixing flour in too early or overworking the batter develops gluten, which can make the cake tough and dense. Whipped egg foams also deflate over time, so the batter should go into the oven soon after the flour is added.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, nutmeg, mace, egg, almond. 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes