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Filling and Frosting for Lady Baltimore Cake

A sugar syrup and egg white frosting with raisins, nuts, and figs used as filling and topping for Lady Baltimore cake.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and fig work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 737 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Filling and Frosting for Lady Baltimore Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the frosting

  1. Dissolve the sugar in boiling water and cook until the syrup can spin a thread.

  2. Pour the syrup in a fine stream onto the beaten egg whites while beating constantly.

  3. Add the chopped raisins, chopped nuts, and thinly sliced figs to the frosting mixture.

Fill and frost

  1. Use this mixture as filling between the cake layers and for frosting the top.

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. Raisin + figtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Raisin + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Nuts + figtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together154 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + figtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Granulated sugar
Dissolves into syrup that, cooked to a thread stage, sets the frosting's structure and sweetness.
Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that is stabilised by the hot syrup, giving the frosting its light, airy body.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness to the frosting filling.
Nuts
Add crunch and contrast to the soft frosting.
Figs
Add chewy texture and fruity sweetness to the frosting filling.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot syrup onto the egg whites. The syrup must be poured in a fine stream while beating constantly. Pouring too fast or without beating can cook the whites unevenly or deflate the foam, so the frosting loses its light, stable texture.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, raisin, fig. 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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