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Dessert

Ground Rice Cakes

A baked cake made from ground rice, flour, sugar, eggs, butter, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Ground Rice Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  2. Add the beaten eggs and sugar, stirring until smooth.

  3. Mix the ground rice, flour, and baking powder together on a plate.

  4. Add the dry mixture to the wet mixture and stir until smooth.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a drop cake tin.

  2. Bake for about 20 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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Rice + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 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 richness and tenderness, and carries flavour through the batter.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the cakes and helps them brown as they bake.
Ground rice
Gives a fine, slightly crumbly texture that differs from wheat flour.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cakes together.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cakes rise and become light.

The step that matters

Stir the dry mixture into the wet until smooth. Overmixing once the flour is added develops gluten and can make the cakes tough. Stir just until the batter is smooth, then bake promptly so the baking powder's rising power is not lost.

“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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