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Dessert

Cream Cakes

A simple cake made by mixing butter, milk, and flour into a paste, kneading, rolling, cutting, and baking on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Cream Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Melt the butter in the milk until it is as rich as cream.

  2. Mix the flour into the milk and butter to form a paste.

  3. Knead the paste well.

  4. Roll the paste out frequently.

Cut and bake

  1. Cut the rolled paste into squares.

  2. Bake the squares on a griddle 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the cakes a tender, savoury-sweet flavour.
Milk
Provides the liquid that forms the paste and adds moisture to the dough.
Flour
Forms the structure of the paste, which holds the cakes together when baked.

The step that matters

Kneading the paste well. Kneading develops gluten in the flour, giving the paste enough elasticity to roll out and hold its shape when cut and baked.

“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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