Pound Cake Lab462 recipes

Pound Cake Lab

Two overlapping styles in 462 pound cake recipes

Leave the recipe names aside and group the 462 recipes by their 6 ingredient ratios alone, so that recipes built alike land together. Each group is named only by the numbers: the ingredients where its recipes sit furthest from the middle of all 462.

The data splits best into two groups, but they overlap: a silhouette of 0.22, on a scale where 0 is no separation and 1 is complete. Read them as tendencies within one broad spread rather than separate kinds of pound cake.

The recipes on one map

Every recipe, placed on the two directions along which the ratios vary most (a principal component projection). Close dots are recipes built alike. The lettered rings mark the middle of each group.

AB
Across →
More dairy, less butter and egg to the right; 29% of the variation.
Up ↑
More sugar and butter, less leavening upward; 24% of the variation.

The two groups

ALess butter, more dairy

297 recipes · 64% of all 462 · median oven 325°F (165°C), 60 min

Where it differs from all recipes

  • Buttermedian 81% vs 91% for all

    average rank: 37th percentile of all recipes

  • Dairymedian 61% vs 46% for all

    average rank: 64th percentile of all recipes · none in 11% (all recipes 32%)

  • Eggmedian 71% vs 80% for all

    average rank: 38th percentile of all recipes

Its median recipe, at 380 g flour

Median recipe of group A in grams, against the median of all recipes
IngredientGroup AAll
Butter305 g345 g
Sugar520 g455 g
Egg270 g305 g
Dairy235 g175 g
Leavening5 g6 g
Salt3 g2.5 g

Each line is the group's median for that ingredient, scaled to 380 g of flour.

Closest to the middle of the group

BMore butter, less dairy

165 recipes · 36% of all 462 · median oven 350°F (175°C), 48 min

Where it differs from all recipes

  • Buttermedian 100% vs 91% for all

    average rank: 74th percentile of all recipes

  • Dairymedian 0% vs 46% for all

    average rank: 25th percentile of all recipes · none in 69% (all recipes 32%)

  • Eggmedian 98% vs 80% for all

    average rank: 72nd percentile of all recipes

Its median recipe, at 380 g flour

Median recipe of group B in grams, against the median of all recipes
IngredientGroup BAll
Butter380 g345 g
Sugar380 g455 g
Egg370 g305 g
Dairynone175 g
Leavening9 g6 g
Salt1 g2.5 g

Each line is the group's median for that ingredient, scaled to 380 g of flour.

Closest to the middle of the group

How the groups are found

Each ratio is converted to a z-score (how many standard deviations a recipe sits from the mean), capped at 3 so one extreme recipe cannot claim a group, and k-means sorts the recipes into k groups, trying k from 2 to 4. Each k runs from 16 fixed starting points and keeps the tightest result, so the page is the same on every build. No group may hold fewer than 47 recipes.

The number of groups is the one with the best silhouette, which compares how close each recipe is to its own group with how close it is to the next one. By number of groups: 2 groups 0.22 · 3 groups 0.21 · 4 groups 0.20. At 0.25 or more the page calls the groups separate; from 0.18 to 0.25, overlapping; under 0.18, no clear styles.

A group's name lists the one to three ingredients where its recipes rank furthest from the middle of all 462, on average. “More” and “less” are relative to the whole dataset, and the names say nothing about texture or taste, which the ratios alone do not show. The median recipe of a group is, like the typical recipe on the overview, the middle of each ingredient separately, not one real recipe. The recipes listed under each group are the ones nearest its center, at most two from any one site.