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Dessert

Tea Caxss

A light cake made with flour, butter, eggs, powdered sugar, caraway seeds, and warm milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and caraway match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,435 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Tea Caxss

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub the butter into the flour.

  2. Add the beaten yolks of two eggs and the white of one egg.

  3. Mix in the powdered sugar and caraway seeds.

  4. Add warm milk to form a paste.

  5. Cover with a cloth.

  6. Let it stand near the fire for nearly an hour.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the paste.

  2. Cut it into round cakes using the top of a glass.

  3. Bake on floured tins.

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 + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Forms the main structure of the paste once mixed with liquid.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the cakes tender and rich.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the paste together.
Egg white
Adds moisture and helps hold the paste together.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown lightly.

The step that matters

Adding the warm milk. Milk should be added gradually so the paste reaches a workable consistency. Too much liquid makes it sticky and hard to roll, while too little leaves it dry and crumbly.

Swap the caraway

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Carawaythe original
  4. Jalapenofits about as well

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