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Dessert

Date Cake

A baked cake made with eggs, sour cream, dates, nuts, and butter, finished with a powdered-sugar icing and split dates.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Date Cake

Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Date 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.

Make the batter

  1. Break the eggs into a cup and fill it with sour cream, then pour the mixture into a mixing bowl.

  2. Add the baking soda, sugar, chopped dates, chopped nuts, butter, and baking powder.

  3. Mix in enough flour to create a stiff batter.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour the batter into a greased baking pan and bake at 350°F (175°C) until done.

  2. For icing, mix the powdered sugar with enough sweet cream to spread smoothly.

  3. Spread the icing on the cooled cake and lay split dates over 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.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Dates + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together178 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Nuts + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during baking.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and tenderness and a slight tang to the crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour cream to produce gas that lightens the cake.
Baking powder
Adds additional leavening so the cake rises and becomes lighter.
Flour
Forms the gluten and starch network that gives the cake its structure.
Dates
Add natural sweetness and moisture, staying soft in the baked cake.

The step that matters

Mix in enough flour to create a stiff batter. Too much flour makes the cake dense and dry, while too little leaves it weak and collapsed. Stop once the batter is stiff enough to hold its shape, since overmixing once gluten has formed can toughen the crumb.

Swap the dates

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Datesthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, sugar, nuts, butter, flour. 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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