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Dessert

Seed Cake

A cake made with flour, butter, eggs, sugar, baking powder, and seeds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Seed Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Put the flour into a bowl and mix the baking powder with the flour.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the butter to a cream.

  2. Add the beaten eggs and sifted sugar to the butter.

  3. Add the seeds and combine all ingredients.

  4. Beat for 5 minutes.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased tin.

  2. Bake.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it sets.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and creaming it traps air for a tender crumb.
Eggs
Add structure and moisture, helping the batter bind and set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the cake a soft texture.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise.

The step that matters

Beat the butter to a cream. Beating butter traps air in the fat, which expands in the oven and helps the cake rise. If the butter is under-beaten, the cake bakes up dense.

“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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