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Dessert

Spiced Tea Cakes

A spiced cake made with eggs, butter, milk, sugar, flour, spices, raisins, baked and frosted.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spiced Tea Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Break the eggs into a cup.

  2. Melt the butter and add it to the eggs.

  3. Fill the cup with milk and pour it into a mixing bowl.

  4. Add the sugar.

  5. Sift the flour three times with the remaining dry ingredients and add to the mixture.

  6. Lastly, stir in the floured raisins.

Bake and frost

  1. Bake in glass pans and frost with white frosting.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 as they set during baking.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cakes together as they bake.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the cakes and helps them brown and keep moist.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that makes the cakes rise.
Milk
Adds moisture that hydrates the flour and helps form the batter.

The step that matters

Sift the flour three times with the dry ingredients. Sifting spreads the baking soda and cream of tartar evenly through the flour and aerates it. Even distribution gives an even rise, and avoiding lumps keeps the crumb uniform.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits about as well
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Gingerfits less well

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