Skip to main content
Dessert

Maple Sugar Cakes

A simple cake made with butter, flour, salt, baking powder, maple sugar, and sweet milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Maple Sugar Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsThe hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub the butter into the flour.

  2. Add the salt and baking powder, and mix thoroughly.

  3. Add the sweet milk to the flour mixture and stir quickly.

  4. If the dough is too thin, add a little more flour.

Add the maple sugar

  1. Soften the maple sugar in a hot oven until it can be cut.

  2. Stir in the softened maple sugar.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough and cut with a biscuit cutter.

  2. Place on a buttered baking tin and bake in a hot oven for about 10 minutes until brown.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Butter
Rubbed into flour to add tenderness and richness to the cakes.
Flour
Forms the structure of the dough once combined with liquid.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, helping the cakes rise and become light.
Maple sugar
Adds sweetness and maple flavour, and browns slightly in the oven.
Sweet milk
Hydrates the flour to form the dough and adds moisture.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to thin dough. Milk amounts vary with flour moisture, so the dough can end up too thin to cut. Adding flour only gradually, a little at a time, keeps it workable without making the cakes dense and tough.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes