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Dessert

Apple Cakbs

Apple cakes are thick batter cakes made with pastry flour, milk, baking soda, salt, brown sugar, butter, and chopped sour apples.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Apple Cakbs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the pastry flour with enough milk to create a thick batter.

  2. Add baking soda, salt, brown sugar, melted butter, and chopped sour apples; mix well.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour batter onto a hot griddle to cook until golden brown.

  2. For thicker batter, fry in hot fat like pancakes.

  3. Serve with butter and sugar on top.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 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. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Flour and butter 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

Pastry flour
Provides the main structure that holds the batter together as it cooks.
Baking soda
Reacts to lighten the batter so the cakes rise and turn tender.
Light brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cakes brown richly on the griddle.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and tenderness in the finished cakes.
Sour apples
Add moisture and a tart flavor that balances the sweetness of the sugar.

The step that matters

Pour batter onto a hot griddle to cook until golden brown. If the griddle is not hot enough, the cakes absorb fat and turn heavy before browning. A properly hot surface sets the outside quickly, forming a golden crust while the inside stays tender.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, sugar, 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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