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Dessert

Banbury Cakes

A sweet pastry cake made with butter, sugar, breadcrumbs, egg, currants, and spices, baked on puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,856 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Banbury Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Beat the butter and sugar until creamy.

  2. Add breadcrumbs, egg, minced peel, spice, and currants to the mixture.

Shape the cakes

  1. Roll out the pastry to ⅛ inch thick and cut into rounds 6 inches in diameter.

  2. Place a small amount of the mixture on each pastry round.

  3. Wet the edges of the pastry.

  4. Fold over the pastry and seal carefully.

  5. Turn the cakes over so the smooth side is up and press down slightly.

Bake and finish

  1. Brush the tops with water.

  2. Dust with sugar.

  3. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 10 to 15 minutes.

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 + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with sugar to give the filling a soft, rich texture and fat for flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and, when dusted on top, helps the crust brown.
Breadcrumbs
Absorb moisture and bind the filling so it holds together in the pastry.
Egg
Binds the filling and adds richness to the mixture.
Currants
Provide sweetness and chewy fruit pieces throughout the filling.

The step that matters

Seal the pastry carefully. If the edges are not wet and firmly pressed together, they can open in the oven and let the filling leak out while baking.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, 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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