Name: Cream Buns
Ingredients: 1 pint choux paste; 1 pint heavy cream; 2 tablespoons castor sugar

Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cream Buns

Ingredients

1 pint choux paste
1 pint heavy cream
2 tablespoons castor sugar

Directions

Make the buns

Shape the choux paste as directed for Coffee Eclairs.
Bake for 10 to 15 minutes until golden.

Fill and serve

Once cool, make an incision on one side and scoop out the soft interior.
Fill with stiffly whipped sweetened cream.
Dredge with castor sugar and serve.

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.

Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Choux paste: Puffs up in the oven to form a hollow shell that holds the filling.
Heavy cream: Whipped to a stiff foam, it provides a light, rich filling.
Castor sugar: Sweetens the whipped cream and lightly coats the finished buns.

“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.