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Dessert

Chocolate Jumbles

A chocolate dough shaped treat made with butter, sugar, eggs, chocolate, flour, baking powder, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Chocolate Jumbles

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.

Make the dough

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the beaten eggs, melted chocolate, and sifted flour mixed with baking powder.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough to 1 inch thick.

  2. Cut out shapes with a doughnut cutter.

  3. Dust with powdered sugar and bake for 10 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

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. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Chocolate + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Flour + milktop 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
Creams with sugar to trap air, giving the dough a tender, rich texture.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.
Unsweetened chocolate
Adds deep chocolate flavour and colour to the dough.
Flour
Forms the structure of the dough as its proteins set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven, helping the jumbles rise and become light.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and, creamed with butter, helps create a tender crumb.

The step that matters

Cream the butter and sugar together. Beating butter and sugar traps air in the fat, which helps the dough stay light. Under-creaming leaves a denser jumble, while over-softened butter can make the dough greasy and spread.

“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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