Skip to main content
Dessert

Bride or Wedding Cake

A yeast‑leavened cake made with flour, spices, butter, eggs, currants, rose water, and optional musk and ambergris.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Bride or Wedding 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 dough

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

  2. Beat the eggs well and strain them with the yeast and a little warm water into the flour.

  3. Add the cold butter, broken into small bits.

  4. Knead the mixture with scalding hot water until well combined.

  5. Cover the dough with a warm cloth and let it rise near the fire for about 15 minutes.

Prepare the currants

  1. Prepare the currants by drying them and mixing with musk and ambergris dissolved in rose water.

Assemble and bake

  1. Layer the dough and currants alternately in a baking pan, ensuring not to break the currants.

  2. Bake until golden brown.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as the bulk of the dough.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender crumb.
Eggs
Add richness and help bind and set the dough's structure.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise.
Currants
Add fruitiness, sweetness and moisture pockets throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Letting the dough rise. Yeast needs warmth to produce the gas that lifts the dough. Keeping it covered and near the fire helps it rise evenly before baking.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, mace, nutmeg, cinnamon, butter, egg, rose):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, mace, nutmeg, cinnamon, butter, egg, rose. 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.

You might also like

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipes