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Dessert

Breakfast and Tea Cakes

A sweet yeast cake made with flour, sugar, butter, milk, and yeast, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Breakfast and Tea Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Boil the milk, then let the milk cool.

  2. Rub the flour and butter together in a bowl.

  3. Add sugar, yeast, and salt to the flour mixture without stirring.

  4. Pour the cooled milk into the flour mixture.

  5. Let the mixture stand overnight.

  6. In the morning, stir the mixture and knead it.

Shape and rise

  1. Let the dough rise until near tea time.

  2. Cut the dough with a cake cutter to mold the cakes.

  3. Apply melted butter on one half of each cake.

  4. Fold the cakes over.

  5. Place the molded cakes in a pan about ¾ inch apart.

Bake

  1. Bake quickly in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the dough together as it rises and bakes.
Active dry yeast
Ferments the sugars in the dough, producing gas that makes the cakes rise and become light.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and browns the cake surfaces during baking.
Milk
Moistens the dough and adds softness and browning through its milk sugars and proteins.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and golden browning to the crust.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand overnight without stirring it in, then stir in the morning. Yeast needs time to ferment slowly; the long rest develops flavor and gas in the dough. Rushing this stage or over-handling the dough can leave the cakes dense and under-risen.

“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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