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Dessert

Oat Meal Drop Cakes

A baked drop cake made with oatmeal, raisins, nuts, butter, sugar, eggs, baking soda, milk, citrus zest, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Oat Meal Drop 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 the dough

  1. Mix together oat meal, raisins, and chopped nut meats.

  2. Cream softened butter with sugar.

  3. Add beaten eggs, baking soda, and milk to the butter mixture.

  4. Incorporate the grated rind and juice of the lemon or orange.

  5. Stir in the flour until well combined.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto a buttered baking sheet.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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
Bind the batter and add structure as they set in the oven.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and helps the cakes brown.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the drop cakes together.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic citrus juice to lift the cakes as they bake.
Sugar
Creams with the butter for sweetness and a tender crumb, and aids browning.
Oat meal
Adds chewy texture and body to the batter.

The step that matters

Dropping the spoonfuls onto the sheet. The batter is soft and loose, so spoonfuls should be uniform and spaced apart. Even portions bake evenly, and spacing keeps the cakes from spreading into one another.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, meat, butter, sugar, egg, milk, 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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