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Royal Ginger Cake

A sweet cake made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, ginger, cinnamon, lemon flavoring, milk, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Royal 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. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the eggs, ginger, cinnamon, and lemon flavoring, mixing well.

  3. Gradually add the milk and mix until combined.

  4. Sift the flour with the baking powder and fold it into the mixture gently.

Bake and serve

  1. If baking as a loaf cake, dust the top with sugar and sprinkle with water before baking.

  2. If baking in layers, assemble with icing after baking.

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. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and give a tender, rich crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake, helps it brown, and tenderizes the crumb when creamed.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set in the oven.
Flour
Forms the cake's main structure once baked.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter.

The step that matters

Fold in the flour gently. Once flour is added, overmixing develops gluten and makes the cake tough and dense. Folding just until combined keeps the crumb light and keeps the air beaten into the batter.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, flour, cinnamon, lemon, milk. 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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