Skip to main content
Dessert

Butter Cakes

Butter cakes are a sweet baked dessert made with butter, sugar, flour, eggs, spices, and optional seeds or currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Butter Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a large bowl.

  2. Add the sifted sugar and dried flour, mixing well.

  3. Incorporate the egg yolks and beat the mixture for 1 hour.

  4. Fold in the egg whites gently.

Flavour and bake

  1. If desired, add seeds, currants, mace, nutmeg, and brandy before baking.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Brandy + curranttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mace + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,791 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

Butter
Creams with the sugar to trap air and add richness and tenderness.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and emulsify the batter; whites, folded in, add lift and structure.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake together as it sets.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the butter hold air when creamed.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavour to the batter.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whites hold air that gives the cake its lift. Stirring them in vigorously knocks that air out, so fold gently with a spatula until just combined.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, flour, egg, mace, nutmeg, brandy):

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

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

More butter cake recipes

Lemon 4 See all 41 →

You might also like

Brandy PeachesBrandy Peaches68 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesBrandy CreamBrandy Cream21 recipes