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Dessert

Treacle Cake

A sweet cake made with treacle, flour, milk, oil, baking soda, and optional cinnamon or ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Coconut and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 979 recipes. Both carry 2-heptanol, which smells bitter, floral. The science ↓

Treacle Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

Mix and bake

  1. In a large bowl, mix together the flour, sweet milk, coconut butter or vegetable oil, baking soda, treacle, and cinnamon or ginger until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into an oiled mold.

  3. Bake in the preheated oven until the cake is a dark brown color.

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. Coconut + cinnamontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together979 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

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

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic treacle to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Treacle
Adds dark sweetness and moisture, and helps the cake brown deeply in the oven.
Coconut butter or vegetable oil
Supplies fat that keeps the crumb tender and moist.

The step that matters

Bake until dark brown. Treacle contains sugars that caramelise and darken as they heat, so color is a useful sign of doneness. Pulling the cake too early leaves a pale, gummy centre, while overbaking dries it out.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, cinnamon. 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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