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Dessert

Grecian Easter Cakes

A sweet yeast dough cake baked at 350°F for an hour, topped with sifted sugar.

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 ↓

Grecian Easter 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.

Make the dough

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

  2. In a bowl, mix the butter and sugar until well combined.

  3. Add the flour, beaten eggs, milk, and yeast to the mixture and blend thoroughly.

  4. Let the dough rise for 2 hours.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into a triangle or a large fleur-de-lys.

  2. Cover the shaped dough thickly with sifted sugar.

  3. Bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour.

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. Flour + eggtop 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
Add structure and richness, helping bind the dough and set during baking.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich flavour in the dough.
All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the dough as its proteins set during baking.
Yeast
Produces gas during the rise, making the dough light and airy.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise for 2 hours. Yeast needs enough time to produce gas and expand the dough. Rising too little leaves the cakes dense, while the structure needs to hold that gas through baking.

“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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