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Dessert

Seed Cake

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and caraway match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,435 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Seed Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cream the butter with the sugar.

  2. Add the eggs one at a time, beating quickly and thoroughly.

  3. Sift the flour.

  4. Mix in the caraway seeds.

  5. Stir the flour mixture into the butter mixture with a metal spoon.

Bake

  1. Pour into a greased cake tin lined with greased paper.

  2. Bake for about 1 hour.

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 + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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
Creamed with sugar to trap air, giving the cake its tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Add structure and richness as they set in the oven, binding the crumb.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise in the oven.
Castor sugar
Creams with butter to aerate the batter and adds sweetness and tenderness.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps the batter reach a smooth, pourable consistency.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs one at a time. Beating each egg in fully before the next keeps the emulsion stable. If eggs are added too quickly, the batter can curdle and lose the air trapped by creaming, which affects the final rise and texture.

Swap the caraway

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Carawaythe original
  4. Jalapenofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, milk, sugar, flour, 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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