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Dessert

Butter Cakes

Butter cakes are small biscuits made from flour, butter, sugar, baking soda, cream of tartar, and milk, baked on a hot plate.

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

Butter Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, combine flour, butter, sugar, baking soda, and cream of tartar.

  2. Add milk gradually until a nice working dough forms.

Shape the cakes

  1. Roll out the dough to ½ inch thickness.

  2. Cut out shapes using a tea biscuit cutter.

  3. Dock the biscuits.

Cook

  1. Bake on a hot plate, turning them over as needed.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the dough together as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich flavour in the finished cakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown as they cook.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the dough to produce gas that helps the cakes rise.
Cream of tartar
Provides acidity that activates the baking soda and stabilises the rise.
Milk
Hydrates the flour so the ingredients bind into a workable dough.

The step that matters

Bake on a hot plate, turning as needed. Baking soda and cream of tartar react quickly once wet, so the dough should be shaped and cooked without long delay to keep the rise. Turning the cakes lets both sides cook evenly and brown without burning.

“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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