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Dessert

Fried Cakes

A sweet fried dough cake made with sugar, eggs, sour cream, buttermilk, baking soda, nutmeg, and flour, dusted with confectioner's sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Fried Cakes

Why it works: Nutmeg and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 411 recipes. Both carry beta-pinene, which smells pine, resin. The science ↓

Fried Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix sugar, eggs, sour cream, buttermilk, baking soda, and nutmeg.

  2. Add flour gradually until a soft dough forms.

  3. Roll the dough to ½ inch thick and cut into rounds, removing a small ring from the center.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat coconut butter in a deep pan until hot enough to fry.

  2. Fry the cakes until nicely browned, then drain on paper towels.

  3. Dust with confectioner's sugar before serving.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Nutmeg + coconuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together411 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-pinene (pine, resin).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Buttermilk + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sugar + buttermilktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure to the cakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour cream and buttermilk to lift and lighten the cakes.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and tang, and tenderizes the dough.
Buttermilk
Adds acidity that activates the baking soda and keeps the cakes tender.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown when fried.

The step that matters

Fry the cakes until nicely browned. The oil must be hot enough to brown the outside quickly. If it is too cool, the cakes soak up grease and turn heavy and greasy instead of crisp and golden.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonfits about as well
  4. Coconutthe original

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