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Dessert

Dessert Cakes

A small cake made from butter, flour, sugar, egg yolks, optional ginger or lemon essence, and currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Dessert Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the batter

  1. Warm the butter in a basin without letting it oil.

  2. Beat the butter to a cream with a wooden spoon.

  3. Gradually add the flour, then the sugar and flavoring.

  4. Moisten the mixture with the well-beaten egg yolks.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto buttered paper, leaving space between each.

  2. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) for 12 to 18 minutes, avoiding too much color.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and gives the cakes a rich, tender texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cakes together as they bake.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the butter cream, and contributes to browning.
Egg yolks
Moisten the batter and add richness, binding the mixture into a cohesive dough.

The step that matters

Bake in a slow oven and watch the color. Sugar and proteins brown quickly with heat, so a slow oven and close watching keep the cakes pale and evenly cooked rather than dark and dry.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, sugar, egg, currant):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Gingerthe original

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