Skip to main content
Dessert

Flannel Cakes

A light, fluffy cake made with sour milk or cream, eggs, baking soda, and flour, cooked on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Flannel Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine sour milk or sour cream with melted butter if using milk.

  2. Add baking soda and mix well.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until light and fluffy.

  4. Gently fold the beaten egg whites into the mixture.

  5. Add flour gradually until you achieve a batter consistency.

Cook

  1. Preheat a griddle and pour batter to form cakes.

  2. Cook until golden brown on both sides.

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. 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).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Sour milk or sour cream
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda so the batter rises and turns tender.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour dairy to release gas, leavening the cakes.
Eggs
Whipped whites trap air and add lift and structure to the batter.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cakes once they hit the griddle.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Beaten egg whites are a foam of trapped air. Stirring vigorously knocks that air out, so the cakes come out flatter and denser. Folding keeps the bubbles intact for lift.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes