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Baking

Fok Cheese Cakes

A baked cake made with cottage cheese, sugar, butter, eggs, and spices, served hot or cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,147 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Fok Cheese Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Line large or small tins with the pastry crust without baking it first.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, combine cottage cheese, sugar, butter, eggs, and cinnamon or nutmeg.

  2. Beat the mixture well until smooth.

  3. Pour the filling into the crust.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake until golden brown.

  2. Serve hot or cold.

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. Walnut + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Cottage cheese + buttertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Cottage cheese + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together46 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Walnut + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Cottage cheese
Forms the body of the filling and gives the cake its creamy, moist texture.
Eggs
Bind the filling and set during baking to give it structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, softening the texture of the filling.

The step that matters

Beat the filling until smooth. Beating evenly blends the cottage cheese, eggs and sugar so the filling bakes uniformly. Lumps of cottage cheese left in the mixture can leave a grainy, uneven texture once set.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cottage cheese, sugar, butter, egg, cinnamon):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pecansfits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Beansfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cottage cheese, sugar, butter, egg, cinnamon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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