Name: Fancy Cookies
Ingredients: plain cookie dough; plump raisins or pieces of dried fruit; sugar for dusting; ground nuts (e.g., pecans, walnuts, peanuts); plain icing; shredded coconut (optional); marshmallow frosting (optional); soft chocolate frosting (optional); maple frosting (optional)

Why it works: Peanut and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 433 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Fancy Cookies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare plain cookie dough.
Before baking, decorate the top with raisins or dried fruit and dust lightly with sugar.
Sprinkle ground nuts or press nut halves onto the surface in a design.
After baking, coat cookies with plain icing.
Decorate with nuts or cut shapes from fruit paste.
Use marshmallow, chocolate, or maple frosting as a filling between cookies if desired.

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.

Peanut + coconuttop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together433 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Pecans + walnuttop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together634 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Walnut + coconuttop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together606 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).
Nuts + peanuttop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together81 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Walnut + peanuttop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together241 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Swap the coconut

The recipe marks coconut as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, sugar, nuts, pecans, walnut, peanut, chocolate):

Vanillafits about as well
Coconutthe original
Figfits less well
Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, sugar, nuts, pecans, walnut, peanut, chocolate. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.