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Dessert

Rice Cakes or Buns

A baked cake or bun made from ground rice, flour, sugar, dripping, eggs, salt, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Rice Cakes or Buns

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the dripping until creamy, then add the sugar and mix well.

  2. Incorporate the eggs one at a time, stirring after each addition.

  3. Stir in the ground rice, salt, flour, and baking powder until combined.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-greased cake tin or greased patty pans.

  2. Bake for about 45 minutes for a large cake or 20 minutes for small ones.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sugar + ricetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Dripping
Creams with the sugar to add fat, tenderness and richness to the crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during baking.
Ground rice
Forms the body of the cake and gives it a slightly crumbly, short texture.
Flour
Adds structure that helps the cakes hold their shape as they bake.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cakes rise and become lighter.
Sugar
Sweetens the cakes and helps the dripping cream into a light base.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs one at a time. Beating each egg in fully before the next keeps the fat and egg emulsified. Adding them all at once can cause the batter to split, which leads to a coarser, denser crumb.

“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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