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Dessert

New York Butter Cakes

A sweet cake made with milk, butter, sugar, eggs, flour, and bread sponge, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

New York Butter Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Combine milk, sugar, and butter in a pot and heat until boiling.

  2. Add sifted flour while stirring with an egg beater.

  3. Remove from heat and transfer to a wooden bowl.

  4. Let the mixture cool until you can hold your hand in it.

  5. Gradually mix in the whole eggs and egg yolks.

  6. Add the bread sponge and enough flour to achieve a tea biscuit dough consistency.

  7. Let the dough rest and rise for 30 minutes.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough into a sheet.

  2. Cut into large biscuits.

  3. Brush the biscuits with egg wash.

  4. Coat them in granulated sugar.

  5. Place the biscuits on baking pans.

  6. Allow them to rise again before baking until golden.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Flour + biscuittop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Milk + teatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together738 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Add richness, structure and colour to the enriched dough.
Egg yolks
Add fat and richness, giving the dough a tender crumb and golden colour.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and rich flavour in the dough.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown as it bakes.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together.
Bread sponge
Ferments to leaven the dough so the biscuits rise.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool until you can hold your hand in it. If the milk mixture is too hot when the eggs go in, the eggs can scramble and the yeast in the sponge can be killed, so the dough will not rise properly.

“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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