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Dessert

Coffee Cake

A sweet baked cake with butter, sugar, milk, flour, eggs, baking soda, cream of tartar, topped with cinnamon, peel, coconut chips, almonds, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

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.

Prepare the batter

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

  2. Beat the butter and sugar together until creamy.

  3. Add the milk, beaten eggs, and flavoring, mixing well.

  4. In a separate bowl, mix the flour with the cream of tartar and baking soda. Combine the dry ingredients with the wet mixture.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour the batter into a flat baking tin and bake for 1 to 1½ hours.

  2. Once baked, spread butter over the top while the cake is hot. Sprinkle with ground cinnamon, chopped peel, coconut chips, chopped burnt almonds, and sugar.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cinnamon + coconuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together979 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.
Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and adds richness and tender texture.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown and stay moist.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter and reacts with baking soda to help the cake rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to release gas, helping the cake rise.

The step that matters

Spreading butter on the cake while it is hot. Hot cake absorbs melted butter more readily, so the topping soaks in and keeps the surface moist rather than greasy sitting on top.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Coconutthe original

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