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Dessert

Gem Fried Cakes

A fried cake made from a sweet milk batter, sugar, eggs, butter, baking powder, flour, and jam filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Gem Fried Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix sweet milk, sugar, eggs, melted butter, and baking powder.

  2. Add flour gradually until the dough is easy to roll out.

  3. Roll out the dough to the same thickness as cookies and cut into circles.

Fill and fry

  1. Place a teaspoon of jam or jelly in the center of one circle and cover with another circle, pressing the edges together.

  2. Fry in hot lard or clarified drippings until cooked through.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 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).

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
Bind the dough and add richness and structure as they set when fried.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, helping the fried cakes rise and become light.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor in the dough.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown when fried.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together for rolling and cutting.

The step that matters

Pressing the edges together. If the edges are not sealed firmly, the filling can leak out into the hot fat and the cake can open or burst while frying.

“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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