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Dessert

Cherry Biscuits

A buttery biscuit dough studded with crystallized cherries, baked until lightly browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cherry Biscuits

Oven, in the book's wordsA sharp oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix the ground almonds with the flour.

  2. Rub in the butter until well combined.

  3. Beat the egg and sugar together, then pour into the flour mixture to form a dough.

Shape the biscuits

  1. Roll out the dough to about ⅛ inch thick.

  2. Stamp out rounds with a fluted cutter about 1½ inches in diameter.

  3. Fold each round over and pinch the edges together.

  4. Place a quarter of a cherry at each end.

Bake

  1. Arrange on a baking sheet and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 10 minutes.

  2. Do not allow the biscuits to brown in the oven.

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 + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 as its proteins and starch set in the oven.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour, it coats the flour and gives the biscuits a tender, crumbly texture.
Egg
Binds the dough together and adds richness and structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the biscuits brown.
Ground almonds
Add nutty aroma and a tender, fine crumb to the dough.
Crystallized cherries
Add sweetness, fruity flavour and a bright colour to the filling.

The step that matters

Do not allow the biscuits to brown in the oven.. Sugar and proteins brown quickly at this heat through the Maillard reaction, so a few minutes too long can turn the biscuits bitter and dark before they are fully baked.

“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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