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Yorkshire Cakes for Breakfast

A yeasted bread cake made with flour, sugar, butter, milk, and yeast, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Yorkshire Cakes for Breakfast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sponge

  1. Prepare a sponge with a little good yeast and let it rise.

Make and shape the dough

  1. Mix the risen sponge with flour, salt, sugar, butter, and enough milk to form a dough.

  2. Mold the dough into medium-sized cakes and place them in a warm spot to rise again.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake the cakes until golden brown.

  2. Serve them buttered or toasted.

  3. Butter them.

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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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
Forms the main structure of the dough once mixed with liquid.
Yeast
Ferments the sponge so the dough rises and becomes light.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, softening the crumb and aiding browning.
Milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the flour and forms the dough.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness and helps the crust brown.

The step that matters

Let the cakes rise again in a warm spot. Yeast works fastest at warm temperatures, so a cool spot slows the second rise and can leave the cakes dense. The dough should look visibly puffed before baking.

“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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