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Dessert

Breakfast and Tea Cakes

Fried cakes made from a dough of cream, eggs, flour, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon, dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,341 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Breakfast and Tea Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, combine cream (or milk and butter) with beaten egg yolks.

  2. Add baking powder, salt, and cinnamon, then gradually mix in enough flour to form a dough.

  3. Roll out the dough as thin as possible and cut into 2-inch squares.

Fry and finish

  1. Heat lard in a deep pan and drop in the squares to fry until golden brown.

  2. Drain on brown paper and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

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. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Egg yolks enrich the dough, adding richness and helping bind it together.
Cream
Adds fat and moisture, making the dough tender and rich.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the dough so the cakes puff slightly while frying.
Flour
Forms the structure of the dough once mixed with the liquid and eggs.

The step that matters

Frying in hot lard. If the lard is not hot enough, the squares absorb grease and turn heavy and oily instead of crisp and golden. Hot fat seals the surface quickly, so the cakes brown evenly and stay light inside.

Swap the cinnamon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, egg, flour, sugar):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Jalapenofits about as well
  3. Cinnamonthe original
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, egg, flour, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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