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Dessert

Wedding or Birthday Cake

A brandy and currant cake with mixed spices, lemon, orange, and citron peel, baked at 300°F for about 3 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Wedding or Birthday Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a large bowl.

  2. Add the sugar, mixed spice, salt, and grated lemon rind; mix well.

  3. Whisk the eggs in a separate bowl and gradually beat them into the mixture.

  4. Add the flour alternately with the brandy, mixing thoroughly.

  5. Fold in the ground almonds, chopped cherries, and finely sliced peels.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a tin lined with parchment paper.

  2. Bake at 300°F (150°C) for about 3 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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Currant + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 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 sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and moisture as they set in the oven.
Flour
Forms the cake's main structure once the proteins set during baking.
Ground almonds
Add moisture and a dense, tender texture to the crumb.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavour and some moisture to the batter.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy fruit pieces throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Baking low and slow. Baking at 300°F for about 3 hours lets the heavy, fruit-filled batter cook through evenly. Too high a heat would set and brown the outside while the centre stays wet.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, egg, lemon, brandy, sugar, orange. 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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