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Dessert

Cup Cake

A sweet cake baked in cups, made with sugar, butter, eggs, flour, baking soda, milk, and rosewater or lemon essence.

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 ↓

Cup Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter until white.

  2. Beat in the eggs.

  3. Stir in 3 cups of sifted flour and rosewater or lemon essence to taste.

  4. Dissolve the baking soda in the milk and strain it into the mixture.

  5. Add 3 more cups of sifted flour.

Bake

  1. Bake immediately in cups or pans.

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. Butter + flourtop 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. Sugar + flourtop 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

Butter
Creams with the sugar to trap air, giving the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the batter hold together as it bakes.
Sifted flour
Provides the main structure that sets the cake as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the milk to release gas that helps the cake rise.
Milk
Moistens the batter and dissolves the baking soda so it spreads evenly.

The step that matters

Bake immediately. Baking soda starts releasing gas as soon as it meets the liquid, so waiting lets the batter lose its lift before it reaches the oven and can leave the cakes flat and dense.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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