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Dessert

Coffee Cake

A yeasted sweet cake flavored with cinnamon, topped with butter, sugar, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and walnut 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 ↓

Coffee Cake

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.

Make the dough

  1. Set the sponge overnight with warm water, yeast cake, and salt.

  2. Add sugar, egg, cinnamon, and lard.

  3. Mix until stiff and let rise.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough.

  2. Place it in pans.

  3. Sprinkle with melted butter, sugar, and cinnamon.

  4. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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. Cinnamon + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Cinnamon + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Yeast cake
Leavens the dough so it rises and becomes light.
Egg
Adds structure and richness to the dough.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until ready after mixing. Yeast needs time and warmth to produce gas that raises the dough. Under-proofed dough bakes up dense, while over-proofed dough can collapse, so the rise has to be judged rather than rushed.

Swap the walnut

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, cinnamon, butter. 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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