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Dessert

Little Cakes

A small cake made with eggs, sweet milk, butter, flour, sugar, baking powder, flavored with lemon or vanilla.

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

Little Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Whip the eggs very lightly.

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  3. Add the sweet milk and mix well.

  4. In a separate bowl, combine the flour and baking powder.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture.

  6. Flavor with lemon or vanilla.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into gem pans and bake.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Eggs
Provide structure and richness, helping the cakes hold their shape while baking.
Butter
Adds fat and tenderness, and creaming it with sugar traps air for a lighter crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cakes and helps browning, while creaming with butter aerates the batter.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cakes as its proteins set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cakes rise and become light.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and helps form a smooth batter that bakes up tender.

The step that matters

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture. Adding flour in portions and mixing gently keeps the batter smooth and limits gluten development, which would otherwise make the cakes tough. Overmixing also deflates the air trapped during creaming, reducing rise.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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