Skip to main content
Dessert

Gingerbread Cake

A sweet cake made with flour, treacle, butter, currants, sugar, buttermilk, ginger, mixed spice, and caraway seeds, baked until firm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and caraway match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,435 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Gingerbread Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the batter

  1. Mix flour and baking soda in a large bowl, rubbing out any lumps.

  2. Rub butter into the flour until it resembles bread crumbs.

  3. Wash currants in cold water, dry them, and add them to the bowl with the dry ingredients.

  4. Stir in treacle and enough buttermilk to form a stiff batter.

Bake and cool

  1. Grease a cake tin and pour in the mixture.

  2. Bake at 300°F (150°C) until a skewer inserted comes out clean.

  3. Cool the cake on a wire rack.

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. Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Ginger + carawaytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together288 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Flour + buttermilktop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Sugar + buttermilktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Molasses + sugartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Treacle or molasses
Adds sweetness, dark colour and moisture, and gives the cake its gingerbread character.
Butter or lard
Rubbed into the flour to tenderise the crumb and add richness.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic buttermilk and treacle to produce gas that lifts the cake.
Buttermilk
Moistens the batter and its acidity activates the baking soda for rising.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of fruit sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Stirring in the buttermilk. Adding too much liquid makes the batter loose and dense, while too little leaves dry pockets of flour. Stop once the batter is stiff, as overmixing after the liquid is added develops gluten and toughens the crumb.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, molasses, butter, sugar, buttermilk, ginger, caraway):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, molasses, butter, sugar, buttermilk, ginger, caraway. 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.

More gingerbread cake recipes

Soft 4New York 3White 3 See all 72 →

You might also like

Ginger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesMolasses CookiesMolasses Cookies96 recipesGinger CakeGinger Cake93 recipesMolasses CakeMolasses Cake90 recipes