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Dessert

English Breakfast Cakes

A yeasted cake made with milk, butter, eggs, sugar, and flour, baked in buttered tins and served warm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

English Breakfast Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Warm the milk and butter until lukewarm.

  2. Add the beaten eggs, sugar, and yeast to the mixture.

  3. Gradually add flour to form a dough, using more if necessary.

  4. Divide the dough into cakes and let them rise for 45 minutes.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake the cakes in buttered tins until golden.

  2. Cut the cakes into slices, butter each side, and warm them for 1 minute before serving hot.

  3. For leftovers, warm and butter them in the same way.

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

Milk
Provides moisture and softness to the dough while keeping it workable.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and helps the cakes brown in the tins.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the dough hold together and bake set.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and promotes golden browning in the baked cakes.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and gives the cakes an airy crumb.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and body.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise for 45 minutes. Yeast needs enough time to produce gas for a light, airy crumb. Under-proofed dough bakes dense, while over-proofed dough can collapse and lose structure.

“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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