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Dessert

Coffee Cakes

A small cake flavored with coffee, sugar, butter, flour, eggs, walnuts, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Coffee Cakes

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 ↓

Coffee 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 batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add half the flour, eggs, and walnuts, and mix well.

  3. Add the remaining ingredients and mix well.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into small buttered tins.

  2. Bake for 15 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Coffee + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Coffee + walnuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together289 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Adds fat and richness, giving the cakes a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps it brown while creaming aerates it.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cakes together as they bake.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set during baking to give structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cakes rise.

The step that matters

Creaming the butter and sugar. Beating butter and sugar together traps air in the fat, which gives the batter lift. If the butter is too cold or the mixing too brief, the cakes can turn out dense.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Cocoafits about as well
  3. Hazelnutfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

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