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Saffron Tea Cakes with Rosewater Icing

Signature Persian flavors wrapped into dainty little packages with a subtle hint of Earl Grey tea! This recipe yields 12 cupcakes, but you may need to eat 2 right away so let’s just say it yields 10.

By tastykitchen · From Open Recipes · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Saffron and tea work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and 13 recipes mention both. Both carry myrcene, which smells balsamic, herbaceous. The science ↓

The recipe

Serves 12
Prep15 min
Cook35 min

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk, wheat, tree nuts (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Step-by-step directions aren't available for this recipe. See the full recipe at the source →

By tastykitchen. Recipe from Open Recipes.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Saffron + teatop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together13 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  2. Saffron + cardamomtop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Pistachio + cardamomtop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together157 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Saffron + pistachiotop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Tea + cardamomtop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together39 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the pistachio

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (saffron, sugar, tea, cardamom, butter, egg, flour):

  1. Almondbetter flavor fit
  2. Pistachiothe original
  3. Walnutabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against saffron, sugar, tea, cardamom, butter, egg, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).