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General Rules for Butter Cakes

A simple butter cake made with butter, eggs, flour, sugar, baking powder, milk, and optional spices or flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

General Rules for Butter Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Grease the cake pans.

  3. Sift the flour before measuring.

  4. Mix the sifted flour with baking powder and spices if using.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter.

  2. Gradually add the sugar and continue creaming.

  3. Beat the yolks and whites of the eggs separately.

  4. Add the yolks to the creamed butter and sugar.

  5. Alternately add the milk and sifted dry ingredients to the mixture.

  6. Add flavoring and the beaten egg whites last.

  7. If using fruit, coat it with a little flour and add it just before the egg whites.

Bake

  1. Bake layer cakes for 25 to 30 minutes and loaf cakes for 40 to 50 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. Butter + milktop 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and add richness and tender texture.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and emulsify the batter; whites add lift and structure.
Pastry flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Fine granulated sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a light, aerated creamed base.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, causing the cake to rise in the oven.
Milk
Adds moisture and liquid that hydrates the flour to form the batter.

The step that matters

Adding the egg whites last. Folding in the beaten whites gently preserves the air they hold; overmixing deflates them, which leads to a denser, flatter cake.

“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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