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Dessert

Baking Powder Rusk

A rusk made with eggs, butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, salt, and water, baked into small cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Baking Powder Rusk

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Mix the beaten yolks of the eggs with the butter and sugar.

  2. Make a dough with the flour and water, mixing in the baking powder and salt.

  3. Add the egg mixture to the dough and form into small cakes.

Finish and bake

  1. Rub the tops with a mixture of sugar and water, then sprinkle with dry sugar.

  2. Bake immediately at 400°F (200°C).

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Eggs
Enrich the dough with richness and help bind it together.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich flavour in the crumb.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the dough.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the rusks rise and become light.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the tops brown as they bake.

The step that matters

Bake immediately at 400°F (200°C). Baking powder starts releasing gas as soon as it is wet and mixed, so waiting lets it lose lift before the rusks reach the oven.

“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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