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Scotch Cakes

Scotch cakes are small butter cakes flavored with caraway, cinnamon, and citron peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Caraway and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 188 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Scotch 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.

Make the dough

  1. Cream the butter and brown sugar together until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the flour, caraway seeds, cinnamon, and citron peel to the mixture.

  3. Mix until a light paste forms; add a little milk if necessary.

Bake

  1. Spoon the mixture into small buttered cake tins.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden brown.

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. Caraway + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together188 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Adds richness and tenderness, and helps the cakes brown as they bake.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the paste together as the cakes set.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and contributes to browning in the oven.
Citron peel
Adds concentrated citrus flavour and chewy texture throughout the cakes.

The step that matters

Creaming the butter and brown sugar. Beating sugar into butter traps air in the fat, which gives the cakes a light, fluffy crumb. Under-creaming leaves a dense texture.

Swap the caraway

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Allspicefits about as well
  3. Clovefits about as well
  4. Carawaythe original

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