Skip to main content
Dessert

Bran Cakes

A baked cake made from bran, eggs, butter, saccharine, and salt.

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

Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Bran Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the bran

  1. Tie bran in a piece of cheesecloth and wash by squeezing water through it until clean. Wring dry.

  2. Dissolve saccharine in 1 teaspoon of water.

Make the batter

  1. Mix bran, beaten eggs, saccharine, and salt together.

  2. Beat the remaining egg white until stiff. Fold the stiff egg white into the mixture.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the mixture into twenty-five small cakes using a knife and tablespoon.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) 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 + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Bran
Forms the body of the cakes and absorbs the liquid in the batter.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and add structure as they set in the oven.
Egg white
Beaten until stiff and folded in, it lightens the batter and helps the cakes rise.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the cakes brown and taste rich.

The step that matters

Folding in the stiff egg white. Stiff egg white traps air, which lifts the mixture while baking. Folding gently keeps that air in; stirring hard would deflate it and leave the cakes dense.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes