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Dessert

Cream Drop Cakes

A sweet cake made by dropping a cream and sugar mixture into a greased pan and baking until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cream Drop Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine sweet cream and sugar.

  2. Add the eggs and mix well.

  3. Stir in baking soda and enough flour to achieve a dropping consistency.

  4. Add flavoring to taste.

Bake and store

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto well-greased baking pans.

  2. Bake until golden.

  3. Allow to cool before storing in a stone jar.

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

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

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Sweet cream
Provides fat and moisture, giving the cakes a tender crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown as they bake.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set in the oven.
Baking soda
Reacts with acidity in the batter to produce gas that helps the cakes rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the drops together while baking.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour to a dropping consistency. Too little flour leaves a batter that spreads thin and bakes flat, while too much makes the cakes dense and dry. The batter should hold its shape when dropped from a spoon, so the flour amount matters.

“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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