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Dessert

Butter Cakes for Tea

A light, buttery cake made with eggs, milk, cream, and flour, served warm with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Butter Cakes for Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs in a bowl.

  2. Add the milk and cream to the eggs.

  3. Dissolve the baking soda in the cream.

  4. Mix the dissolved baking soda into the batter.

  5. Add salt, cinnamon, and rose water if desired.

  6. Stir in sifted flour until the batter is smooth and thick.

Cook and stack

  1. Preheat a griddle or pan.

  2. Grease the griddle or pan well with butter.

  3. Drop small, thin rounds of batter onto the griddle.

  4. Cook until browned.

  5. Turn to brown the other side.

  6. Stack the cakes on a plate with a little butter between each layer.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness to the cakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the batter to produce gas, helping the cakes rise and lighten.
Sifted flour
Provides the main structure that sets the batter into cakes when cooked.
Milk
Adds moisture and liquid so the flour hydrates into a pourable batter.
Cream
Adds fat and moisture, giving the cakes a softer, richer texture.

The step that matters

Dissolve the baking soda in the cream. Baking soda must be fully dissolved before mixing so it spreads evenly through the batter. Unevenly distributed soda creates pockets of gas and uneven rising, and browning can be patchy.

Swap the cinnamon

The recipe marks cinnamon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, cream, rose, flour, butter):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonthe original
  3. Tarragonfits less well
  4. Parsleyfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, cream, rose, flour, 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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