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Dessert

Spice Cake

A baked cake flavored with cloves, cinnamon, and allspice, topped with a sugar‑water icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Spice Cake

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spice 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.

Make the cake

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter.

  3. Add the sour milk and mix well.

  4. In another bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, cloves, cinnamon, and allspice.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, mixing until smooth.

  6. In a separate bowl, beat the 5 eggs and fold into the batter.

  7. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

Make the icing and assemble

  1. For the icing, combine 4 cups of sugar with 1 cup of boiling water in a saucepan.

  2. Boil until it reaches a soft ball stage when dropped in water.

  3. Pour the hot syrup over the reserved egg whites while beating continuously until well combined.

  4. Spread the icing between the layers of the cooled cake.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  5. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Add structure and richness, and the whites whip into the icing for a light texture.
Butter
Adds fat and tenderness, and creaming it with sugar traps air for a lighter crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda to help the cake rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that leavens the cake.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown and stay moist.

The step that matters

Boiling the icing syrup to soft ball stage. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration and temperature to set correctly. Undercooked syrup stays runny, while overcooked syrup turns grainy or hard when beaten into the egg whites.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits about as well
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Gingerfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, milk, flour, egg, cinnamon, allspice. 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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