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Dessert

Huckleberry Cakes

A simple baked cake made with flour, butter, salt, baking powder, sugar, milk, and huckleberries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Huckleberry Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the salt, baking powder, and sugar with the flour.

  2. Rub in the butter and moisten with milk to make a dough stiff enough to hold its shape when dropped from a spoon.

Bake

  1. Flour the huckleberries, stir them in quickly, and drop by large spoonfuls onto a well-buttered shallow pan or into muffin pans.

  2. Bake for twenty 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Flour
Forms the structure of the cake once it sets in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the dough and gives a rich flavour.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven so the cake rises and becomes light.
Huckleberries
Add fruit moisture, tartness, and flavour throughout the cake.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown lightly in the oven.
Milk
Moistens the flour so the dough holds together and sets in the oven.

The step that matters

Flouring the huckleberries before folding them in. Flour coats the berries so they are less likely to sink and bleed colour. Stirring quickly keeps the dough from overworking, which would toughen the cake.

“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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