Skip to main content
Dessert

Ginger Cake

A sweet cake flavored with powdered ginger, made with butter, flour, sugar, eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Ginger Cake

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Ginger 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

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

Make the batter

  1. Beat the butter until creamy, then gradually add the sugar, flour, and ginger.

  2. Beat the eggs until stiff, then fold them into the mixture.

  3. Pour the batter into a shallow cake tin.

Bake

  1. Bake for about 1 hour.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it sets.
Eggs
Beaten until stiff, they add lift and help bind the batter into a light structure.
White sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a soft, tender texture when creamed with butter.
Powdered ginger
Adds the warm, spicy aroma that defines this cake.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly beaten eggs. Folding gently keeps the air bubbles in the whipped eggs. Stirring vigorously would deflate them, leaving the cake denser and less risen.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, 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.

More ginger cake recipes

Soft 45Molasses 13Hard 6Sponge 5Yorkshire 5Honey 4 See all 129 →

You might also like

Ginger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesGinger Pound CakeGinger Pound Cake29 recipesGinger Ice CreamGinger Ice Cream28 recipes