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Dessert

Chocolate Drop Cakes

A sweet baked treat made with butter, brown sugar, chocolate, flour, baking powder, raisins or dates, nuts, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Chocolate Drop Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Melt the chocolate over hot water and mix it with the boiling water.

  2. In a bowl, cream the butter and brown sugar, then add the eggs and melted chocolate mixture.

  3. Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt, then gradually add to the wet ingredients.

  4. Fold in the raisins or dates and nuts.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the batter onto an ungreased baking sheet.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 12 to 15 minutes.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Chocolate + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Raisin + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 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

Butter
Creams with the sugar to add richness and a tender crumb.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cakes stay soft.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the cakes set in the oven.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the drops together as they bake.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven so the drops rise and become light.
Chocolate
Gives the cakes their chocolate flavour and a deeper colour.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture gradually. Adding dry ingredients in portions and mixing only until combined keeps the batter smooth and limits gluten development, which would otherwise make the cakes tough.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, chocolate, egg, flour, raisin. 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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