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Dessert

Tea Cakes

A sweet cake made with flour, sugar, butter, cinnamon, nutmeg, eggs, baked at 400°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Tea Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Wash the butter well in cold water.

  2. Cream the butter with the sugar.

  3. Add the well-beaten egg yolks.

  4. Lightly fold in the flour and spices.

  5. Beat the egg whites until very light.

  6. Mix the beaten egg whites into the batter.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough.

  2. Cut the dough into shapes.

  3. Sprinkle each cake with granulated sugar.

  4. Bake in buttered pans at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cakes together as they bake.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness, and creaming it traps air for lightness.
Sugar
Sweetens the cakes and helps them brown as they bake.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and binding; whites, beaten, add lift and a lighter crumb.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites until very light. Whites must be beaten to a light foam so they hold air; folding them in gently preserves that air, which gives the cakes lift. Overbeaten or deflated whites lose this effect.

“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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