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Dessert

Dough Cake

A sweet cake made from bread dough, currants, sugar, candied peel, butter, egg, and optional mixed spice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Dough Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. In a basin, combine 2 cups of dough.

  2. Wash and dry ¾ cup of currants, then pick over to remove any stones.

  3. Add the currants, ¾ cup of sugar, and 1 oz. of chopped candied peel to the dough. Optionally, add ½ teaspoon of mixed spice.

  4. Break in 1 egg and add 2 oz. of butter. Beat all ingredients well together.

Bake and serve

  1. Grease a tin well with dripping.

  2. Pour the mixture into the greased tin.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for about 40 minutes, or until a clean knife comes out of the cake clean.

  4. Turn the cake out of the tin and place it on its side against a plate until cool.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Currant + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Dough
Forms the base of the cake, giving it a bread-like structure and crumb.
Egg
Binds the mixture and adds structure and richness as it sets in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour in the crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown during baking.
Currants
Provide fruit pieces and moisture that stay distributed through the cake.

The step that matters

Beat all ingredients well together. Thorough beating distributes the egg, fat and sugar evenly through the dough, so the cake bakes with a uniform texture instead of streaks or dense pockets.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, egg, sugar, butter. 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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