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Dessert

Tea or Breakfast Cakes

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Tea or Breakfast 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 dough

  1. Rub a little butter into the flour and powdered sugar.

  2. Mix in the yeast and gradually add the milk to form a stiff dough.

  3. Let the dough rise until doubled in size.

Shape and rise

  1. Shape the dough into cakes and place them on a baking sheet.

  2. Allow the cakes to rise again in a warm place.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

  2. Cut the cakes and butter them before serving.

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. Milk + buttertop 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

All-purpose flour
Provides the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and holds the risen gas.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide as it ferments, which makes the dough rise and become light.
Whole milk
Hydrates the flour to form the dough and adds softness and some browning from its milk sugars.
Powdered sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness, and helps the crust brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until doubled in size. Yeast produces the gas that lifts the dough. If the first rise is cut short, the cakes stay dense and heavy after baking, so wait until the dough has visibly doubled.

“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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