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Dessert

Little Cakes

A small cake made with butter, sugar, spices, lemon peel, eggs, currants, flour, and sweet wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Little Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the butter to a cream.

  2. Add the sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon peel, eggs, currants, flour, and sweet wine.

  3. Work the mixture together until well combined.

  4. Roll it out and cut into small cakes.

Bake and finish

  1. Brush the cakes with sweet wine using a feather.

  2. Sift grated sugar over the cakes.

  3. Bake on tins 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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creamed butter gives the cakes richness and a tender, crumbly texture.
Eggs
Beaten eggs bind the dough and add structure and richness.
Flour
Flour provides the structure that holds the cut cakes together while baking.
Sugar
Sugar adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown as they bake.
Currants
Currants add sweetness and chewy fruit pieces throughout the cakes.

The step that matters

Bake on tins until golden. Browning depends on time and heat; the sugar caramelises and sets the surface color, so pulling the cakes too early leaves them pale and soft, while leaving them too long dries and darkens them.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon, egg, 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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