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Dessert

Vanity Cakes

Vanity Cakes are thin wafer-like cakes made from eggs, flour, salt, and fried in drippings or lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Vanity Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the eggs well and mix in a pinch of salt.

  2. Gradually add all-purpose flour until the dough is very stiff.

  3. Roll out the dough thin enough for wafers.

Shape and fry

  1. Cut out shapes with a small biscuit cutter.

  2. Roll each piece as thin as possible.

  3. Fry in hot drippings or lard until delicately brown and crisp, with little bubbles.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Bind the flour into a dough and add structure and richness to the crisp wafers.
All-purpose flour
Forms the stiff dough whose gluten network holds the thin shapes together while frying.
Drippings or lard
Fat for frying that conducts heat evenly and browns and crisps the thin dough.

The step that matters

Fry in hot drippings or lard. Fat must be hot enough to crisp and brown the thin dough quickly. If it is too cool, the pieces absorb fat, turn greasy and stay pale and tough.

“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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