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Dessert

Rice Cakes

A sweet cake made with flour, ground rice, sugar, butter, eggs, and lemon flavoring, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,366 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Rice 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

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

Mix the dough

  1. In a large bowl, combine flour, ground rice, sugar, and butter.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix the dissolved ammonia with cold water. Add the ammonia mixture to the dry ingredients and mix well.

  3. Incorporate the eggs and lemon flavoring into the mixture.

Bake and finish

  1. Wash the top with beaten egg and dust with broken sugar.

  2. Bake in the preheated oven until golden brown.

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. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Flour and butter 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

Ammonia
Releases gas in the dough during baking, helping it rise and become light and open.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, setting as the dough bakes and giving it a tender crumb.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and carries flavour through the dough.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure of the dough as its proteins and starches set in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps the top brown during baking.

The step that matters

Mixing the dissolved ammonia into the dry ingredients. Ammonia breaks down into gas as the dough heats, so it must be evenly dispersed in the mix and the dough baked promptly to get an even, light rise instead of uneven holes or a dense result.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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