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Dessert

Coffee Cake

A yeasted sweet bread with a sugared cinnamon topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Coffee Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, cream together the sugar and butter.

  2. Add the eggs, sweet milk, and yeast, mixing well.

  3. Gradually add flour until the dough is kneadable.

  4. Let the dough rise until light.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough to 1 inch thick.

  2. Let it rise again until ready to bake.

  3. Brush the top with egg or bits of butter.

  4. Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon before baking.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 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. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Sugar
Sweetens the dough and adds to browning of the crust.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the crumb.
Eggs
Add structure and richness to the dough.
Sweet milk
Provides moisture and hydrates the flour for kneading.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Flour
Forms the gluten structure that gives the dough its body.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until light. Yeast needs enough time to produce gas for the dough to rise fully. Under-proofed dough bakes dense, while over-proofed dough can collapse and lose structure.

Swap the cinnamon

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

  1. Cinnamonthe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Capersfits less well
  4. Parsleyfits less well

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