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Dessert

Surprise Coffee Jumbles

A cookie with a coffee-infused filling, made from butter, sugar, flour, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Surprise Coffee Jumbles

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.

Make the dough

  1. Cream together the butter and sugar.

  2. Add the beaten egg and mix well.

  3. Sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt.

  4. Add the dry ingredients alternately with the sour milk to the butter mixture until combined.

Make the coffee filling

  1. Scald the milk with the ground coffee in a double boiler for 10 minutes.

  2. Strain the scalded milk.

  3. Cream the butter in a separate bowl.

  4. Add flour, sugar, salt, and egg yolk to the butter.

  5. Pour the scalded milk over this mixture, stirring constantly.

  6. Return the mixture to the double boiler and cook for 15 minutes.

  7. Allow the filling to cool.

Assemble and bake

  1. Roll the cookie dough to ⅛ inch thickness.

  2. Cut the dough with a round cutter.

  3. Place filling on half of the rounds.

  4. Cover with the remaining rounds.

  5. Press the edges to seal.

  6. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 11 minutes.

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. Milk + coffeetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Butter
Creams with sugar to form a tender, aerated base for the dough.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and filling and helps create a tender crumb and browning.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough and filling together.
Sour milk
Acidity reacts with baking soda to lift the dough and adds tenderness.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that leavens the cookies.
Ground coffee
Steeped in the hot milk to give the filling its coffee flavor.

The step that matters

Scalding the milk with coffee and cooking the filling in a double boiler. Gentle, controlled heat is needed so the egg yolk and flour thicken the filling smoothly without curdling or scorching, while the coffee infuses the milk. Stirring constantly keeps the mixture even.

“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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