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Dessert

Tea Cakes

A sweet cake made with sugar, butter, sour milk, eggs, baking soda, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Tea 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 the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a large bowl, beat together the sugar and butter until creamy.

  3. Add the sour milk and eggs, mixing well.

  4. Stir in the baking soda and enough flour to form a soft dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough on a floured surface, cut into shapes, and place on a baking sheet.

  2. Bake until lightly golden.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Sugar
Sweetens the cakes and helps give them a tender crumb when creamed with butter.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture, and is creamed with sugar to trap air.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda and adds moisture and a slight tang.
Eggs
Bind the dough, add moisture and structure, and enrich the crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce carbon dioxide, helping the cakes rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the dough into a soft, shapeable form.

The step that matters

Stir in the baking soda and flour. Baking soda needs acid from the sour milk to work, so it should be mixed in promptly. Adding too much flour or overworking the dough can toughen the cakes, so the dough should stay soft.

“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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