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Dessert

Anise Cakes

Anise cakes are sweet baked goods made with powdered sugar, eggs, butter, hartshorn, flour, and anise seed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and anise work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 270 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Anise Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix powdered sugar and eggs until well combined.

  2. Add butter and stir for 1 hour.

  3. Incorporate powdered hartshorn and enough flour to form a very stiff dough.

Shape and rest

  1. Roll out the dough and use a wooden cake mold to cut shapes.

  2. Let the cut shapes stand overnight.

Bake

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Grease baking pans with beeswax and sprinkle with anise seed.

  3. Bake the cakes in the preheated oven until 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. Flour + anisetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together270 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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
Bind the sugar and set the structure of the cakes as they bake.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the cakes a tender, crisp texture.
Powdered hartshorn
Acts as a leavening agent, releasing gas to lift the stiff dough as it bakes.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the very stiff dough together.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender crumb.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter into the egg and sugar mixture. The record calls for stirring for 1 hour, and this long beating is what builds air into the batter. Under-mixing leaves the cakes dense, while the stiff dough needs enough structure to hold its shape.

Swap the anise

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Anisethe original

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