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Dessert

Bicuits Au Cocoa

Biscuits au Cocoa are chocolate‑flavored biscuits made with cocoa, sugar, eggs, butter, baking soda, cream of tartar, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream 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 ↓

Bicuits Au Cocoa

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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs with the sugar.

  2. Add the cocoa and mix well.

  3. Thicken the mixture with flour as needed.

  4. Stir in the melted butter, baking soda, and cream of tartar.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough and cut into shapes.

  2. Bake until golden 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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Cocoa + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together548 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-undecalactone (coconut, creamy).

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 dough and add structure and lift as they set in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the biscuits and helps them brown during baking.
Cocoa
Provides the chocolate flavour and colour of the biscuits.
Melted butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the finished biscuits.
Baking soda
Reacts with acid in the dough to produce gas, helping the biscuits rise.
Cream of tartar
Acts as an acid that works with baking soda and stabilises the eggs.

Swap the cocoa

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Macadamia nutfits better
  4. Cocoathe original

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