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Baking

Seed Cake

Seed Cake is a baked cake made with flour, brown sugar, seeds, milk, butter, eggs, and baking soda.

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 ↓

Seed Cake

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.

Prepare

  1. Sift together the flour, brown sugar, and cream of tartar.

  2. Warm the milk and butter together.

Make the dough

  1. Add the sour milk and baking soda to the warm milk mixture and beat until frothy.

  2. Incorporate the beaten eggs and seeds into the mixture.

  3. Mix everything together with your hands until combined.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the dough thin and cut it into rounds.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 15 minutes.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping bind the dough.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in sour milk to release gas that lightens the dough.
Sour milk
Supplies acidity for the baking soda reaction and adds moisture.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the dough tender and rich in flavor.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness, moisture, and a deeper flavor with some browning.

The step that matters

Adding the baking soda to the sour milk. Baking soda reacts with the acid in sour milk and starts releasing carbon dioxide as soon as they combine. That gas gives the cake its lift, so the dough should be shaped and baked promptly rather than left to stand, or it may lose some of its rising power.

“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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