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Dessert

Fruit Layer Cake

A layered cake made with butter, sugar, milk, flour, egg whites, baking powder, almond extract, raisins, and almonds, topped with boiled icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fruit Layer 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.

  2. Mix in the almond extract and milk.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  4. Sift the baking powder with the flour, then fold it into the butter mixture.

Bake and assemble

  1. Divide the batter into layers and bake until golden.

  2. For the filling, make a boiled icing and mix in the raisins and almonds.

  3. Spread icing between the layers and sprinkle with additional fruit.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Almond + raisintop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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 give the cake its tender, rich crumb.
Egg whites
Beaten to stiff peaks, they lighten the batter and help it rise.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the layers rise.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the layers together.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown and stay moist.

The step that matters

Folding the egg whites. Egg whites are not listed as folded into the batter in the steps, so the method is unclear; the record's step says to fold the baking powder-flour mixture into the butter mixture.

“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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