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Dessert

Dough Cake

A baked cake made from bread dough, currants, sugar, eggs, and optional mixed spice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Dough Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place 2 cups of dough in a basin.

  2. Wash and dry 1 lb. of currants, then pick the currants over to remove any stones.

  3. Grease a 1-quart tin with dripping.

Mix and bake

  1. Add the currants and ½ lb. of sugar to the dough.

  2. Optionally, add ½ teaspoon of mixed spice.

  3. Break 2 eggs into the basin and beat all ingredients together well.

  4. Pour the mixture into the greased tin.

  5. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for about 40 minutes, or until a clean knife inserted comes out clean.

Finish

  1. Turn the cake out of the tin.

  2. Place the cake on its side against a plate until cool to prevent it from becoming heavy.

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

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Currant + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Dough
Forms the base of the cake, giving it a bread-like crumb structure.
Currants
Add sweetness, moisture and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the cake.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown during baking.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and add structure and richness to the crumb.

The step that matters

Turning the cake out and cooling it on its side. Cooling the cake on its side against a plate keeps it from sinking and turning heavy as the crumb sets, so it holds its shape and light texture.

Swap the currant

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

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

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