Skip to main content
Dessert

Sweet Griddle Cakes

A batter of milk, eggs, sugar, butter, flour, and baking powder is cooked on a griddle and layered with sweet jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Sweet Griddle Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Separate the egg whites and yolks.

  2. Beat the egg whites until well frothed.

  3. In a bowl, mix the melted butter, powdered sugar, and 1 cup of flour with the baking powder, then stir the mixture into the egg yolks.

  4. Add the milk and the beaten egg whites.

  5. If needed, add more flour to achieve a moderately thin batter.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook small cakes on a griddle.

  2. Butter each cake as it comes off the heat.

  3. Stack 4 cakes with very thin layers of sweet jelly between them.

  4. Sprinkle powdered sugar on top.

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. Milk + buttertop 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

Eggs
Yolks enrich the batter and whites, beaten to froth, lighten it so the cakes rise tender.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the cakes rise and become light.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cakes as they cook.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter to a pourable consistency.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the cakes brown and stay tender.
Sweet jelly
Adds sweetness and moisture between the stacked cakes.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten egg whites. Whites hold air only when beaten to a froth and folded in gently; overmixing or deflating them makes the cakes dense instead of light.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes