Skip to main content
Bread

Bread Crumb Cakes

Bread crumb cakes are sweet cakes made with sugar, flour, shortening, baking soda, sour milk, cinnamon, raisins or dates, bread crumbs, and optional nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Bread Crumb Cakes

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bread Crumb Cakes

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. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix together the sugar, flour, shortening, baking soda, sour milk, cinnamon, raisins or dates, and bread crumbs.

  2. If desired, add the nuts.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto greased baking tins.

  2. Bake until golden brown.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Raisin + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Provide the bulk of the cake, giving body and a soft, moist crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown as they bake.
Shortening
Adds fat for tenderness and a moist texture.
Sour milk
Adds acidity and moisture, reacting with the baking soda to lift the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that helps the cakes rise.
Flour
Adds structure that holds the cakes together as they bake.

The step that matters

Bake until golden brown. Because the batter is spooned rather than spread, the cakes can look done on the outside while still moist inside. Baking until golden brown, rather than by a fixed time alone, helps ensure the centres set and the surfaces brown properly.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour, milk, cinnamon, raisin, bread):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, milk, cinnamon, raisin, bread. 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.

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesNut BreadNut Bread109 recipesWheat BreadWheat Bread65 recipes