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Dessert

Spanish Buns

Spanish buns are sweet buns flavored with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and sour milk, topped with orange-flavored boiled icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Spanish Buns

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 the batter

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together the brown sugar and butter.

  3. Add the sour milk, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves; mix well.

  4. Stir in the flour and eggs until combined.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour the batter into a shallow pan and bake until golden.

  2. Prepare boiled icing flavored with orange and spread it on top.

  3. Cut into squares when ready to serve.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the bars brown and stay soft.
Butter
Creams with the sugar to add fat, tenderness and richness to the crumb.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda so the batter rises and turns tender.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that leavens the batter.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the batter as it bakes.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.

The step that matters

Adding the baking soda to the sour milk. Baking soda needs an acid to react with; the sour milk supplies it. Mixing too little or letting the batter sit too long before baking loses the rising power, so the result can be dense.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Allspicefits about as well
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Gingerfits less well

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