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Dessert

Plain Cup Cake

A simple cupcake made with sugar, butter, eggs, flour, milk, baking soda, and optional rosewater or lemon extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Plain Cup Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the beaten eggs and mix well.

  3. Stir in 3 cups of flour, rosewater or lemon extract, and baking soda that has been mixed in the milk.

  4. Gradually add the remaining 3 cups of flour.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into cups or pans and bake.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps it brown and hold a tender crumb when creamed with butter.
Butter
Adds fat and, when creamed, traps air that gives the cupcakes a light texture.
Eggs
Add structure and richness and help bind the batter as they set in the oven.
Flour
Forms the main structure that sets as the cupcakes bake.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidity in the batter to release gas, helping the cupcakes rise.

The step that matters

Adding the baking soda in milk. Baking soda needs an acid to react and create lift. Mixing it into the milk and then into the batter spreads it evenly, so the cupcakes rise uniformly rather than in patches.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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