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Dessert

Cream Tea-cakes

A quick, buttery cake made with sour cream, flour, egg, and baking soda, baked on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cream Tea-cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix sour cream, flour, beaten egg, salt, butter, and baking soda.

  2. Let the dough rest for 15 minutes.

Shape and cook

  1. Roll out the dough to ½ inch thick and cut into rounds.

  2. Bake on a hot griddle until golden.

Serve

  1. Spread with butter and serve hot.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 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. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

Sour cream
Adds moisture and acidity, tenderising the dough and reacting with the baking soda.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cakes together as they cook.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour cream's acidity to produce gas that lifts the cakes.
Beaten egg
Binds the dough and adds richness and structure.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and flavour and helps browning on the griddle.

The step that matters

Bake on a hot griddle until golden. The griddle must be hot enough for the baking soda to lift the cakes quickly. Too cool a surface lets them spread and turn pale and dense before browning.

“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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