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Dessert

Ribbon Cake

A layered cake made with two batters, colored with chocolate and cochineal, and optionally flavored with fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 ↓

Ribbon 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.

Prepare the batters

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together 1 cup butter and 1 cup sugar until light and fluffy. Add 5 egg yolks, 1 cup milk, 2 cups flour, and 1½ teaspoons baking powder. Mix well.

  3. Divide the batter in half. Flavor one half with orange. Flavor the other half with vanilla and enough grated chocolate to color it brown.

  4. For the second mixture, cream together 1 cup butter and 1½ cups sugar. Add 5 egg whites, 1 cup milk, 2 cups flour, and 1½ teaspoons baking powder. Mix well.

  5. Divide this batter in half. Flavor one half with lemon. Flavor the other half with rose water and enough pulverized cochineal to color it pink or red.

Assemble and bake

  1. Take enough batter from each half for one layer.

  2. Mix the remaining batter together. Fold in your choice of fruit.

  3. Bake in 5 layers, alternating the fruit layers with the brown, white, yellow, and red layers.

  4. Assemble the cake while hot, without any filling between the layers.

  5. Frost the top if desired.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Orange + vanillatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  5. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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, giving the cake a light, tender crumb.
Egg yolks
Add richness, fat and colour-rich structure to the batter.
Egg whites
Whipped air and protein give the second batter lift and a lighter structure.
Flour
Provides the main structure that sets as the cake bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the layers rise.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps it brown and stay tender.

The step that matters

Assemble the cake while hot, without any filling between the layers. Layers stacked while hot are soft and can slump or tear, so they must be handled gently and assembled in the order given to keep the colours distinct.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Blackberryfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, sugar, flour, milk, vanilla, lemon. 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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