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Dessert

Little White Cakes

A small, lightly sweetened cake made with flour, sugar, butter, egg, caraway, milk, and water, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Little White Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Dry the flour.

  2. Rub in a little pounded sugar and butter.

  3. Add the egg, caraway, and enough milk and water to make a paste.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the paste thin and cut it with the top of a canister or glass.

  2. Bake on tin plates for fifteen 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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Provides the main structure that the dough sets around when baked.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the cakes short and tender in texture.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds richness to the cakes.
Pounded sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown lightly in the oven.
Milk
Adds moisture so the flour and fat form a workable paste.
Caraways (in the method)
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour to the cakes.

The step that matters

Roll the paste thin. Thin dough dries out and crisps evenly in the oven, while thicker pieces stay soft and doughy in the centre.

“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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