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Dessert

Sweet Cakes

A sweet cake made with sugar, butter, egg, flour, corn starch, sweet milk, currants, and leavening, rolled in powdered sugar and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Sweet Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the dough

  1. Mix sugar, butter, and egg until creamy.

  2. Add corn starch, flour, sweet milk, cream of tartar, baking soda, salt, and currants. Mix well.

  3. Roll the dough in powdered sugar.

Shape and bake

  1. Cut into strips.

  2. Twist the strips like champagne cakes.

  3. Sprinkle with colored caraway comfits.

  4. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until light brown.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

Butter
Adds fat that softens the dough and gives a tender crumb.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds structure as it sets in the oven.
Flour
Provides the main structure of the cakes as the dough sets.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the dough and works with baking soda to help the cakes rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the dough to produce gas that lightens the cakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps the surface brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Bake until light brown. Baking soda and cream of tartar need the heat of the oven to release gas and set the dough. Pulling the cakes out too early leaves them dense and doughy, while overbaking dries them out and darkens them too much.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, corn, flour, milk, cream. 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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