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Dessert

Fig Cream

A dessert of caramel-frosted cupcake pieces topped with hazelnuts and served with a whipped fig cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Hazelnut and fig share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fig Cream

Oven, in the book's wordsA medium oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cake

  1. Cut narrow, wedge-shaped pieces from the cupcake.

  2. Cover each piece with caramel frosting and top with a hazelnut.

Make the fig cream

  1. Whip the heavy cream until soft peaks form.

  2. Fold in the sugar, chopped figs, and sherry or rum.

Assemble and serve

  1. Arrange the cake slices, points up, around a platter.

  2. Spoon the fig cream mixture in the center.

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. Hazelnut + figtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Fig + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Hazelnut + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together332 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Heavy cream
Whipped into soft peaks, it forms the light, airy body of the fig cream.
Figs
Stewed and chopped, they add fruity sweetness and a soft, jammy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the whipped cream and balances the tartness of the figs.
Rich cupcake
Provides a tender, rich cake base for the frosted slices.
Caramel frosting
Adds sweetness and a buttery caramel flavour to each cake piece.

The step that matters

Whip the heavy cream until soft peaks form. Overwhipping cream past soft peaks makes it grainy and can turn it into butter, while underwhipping leaves the fig cream runny and unable to hold its shape.

Swap the hazelnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Hazelnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, fig, sherry. 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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