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Dessert

Cardamom Cakes

A fried cake made from egg yolks, flour, sugar, cream, and cardamom.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cardamom Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Work the egg yolks into a smooth paste with enough flour to make it stiff.

  2. Add the caster sugar, cream, and bruised cardamom seeds.

Cut and fry

  1. Roll out the paste and cut it into shapes with ornamental cutters.

  2. Fry the shapes in hot butter, adding a small amount of water to the butter if necessary.

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

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

  2. Flour + cardamomtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together643 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter 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

Egg yolks
Bind the paste and add richness and colour to the cakes.
Flour
Gives the paste enough body to be stiff enough to roll and cut.
Caster sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown during frying.
Cream
Adds fat and moisture, making the paste tender.
Cardamom seeds
Provide a warm, aromatic flavour throughout the cakes.

The step that matters

Frying in hot butter. If the butter is not hot enough, the cakes absorb grease and turn heavy; if it is too hot, the outside browns before the inside cooks. Adding a little water helps control the butter's temperature and prevents it from scorching.

Swap the cardamom

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Cardamomthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, sugar, cream, 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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