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Dessert

Breakfast or Tea Cakes

A simple dough of flour, butter, and salt, rolled into balls and cooked in wafer irons over a fire.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream 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 ↓

Breakfast or Tea Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix flour, melted butter, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add enough cream, milk, or water to form a dough.

  3. Work the dough well and roll it into round balls.

Cook the cakes

  1. Preheat wafer irons and place a ball of dough in each.

  2. Press the irons together and hold over the fire for 1-2 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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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 as its proteins form a gluten network when worked with liquid.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the dough and carries flavor, keeping the cakes rich.
Cream, milk, or water
Hydrates the flour so the particles stick together into a workable dough.

The step that matters

Holding the irons over the fire. Heat must reach the dough through thin irons to set it into a cake. Too little time leaves the centre raw and doughy, while too much scorches the outside before the inside is cooked.

“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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