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Dessert

German Coffee Cake

A yeasted cake made with butter, lard, sugar, eggs, milk, flour, and yeast cake, baked with a sugar and cinnamon topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

German Coffee Cake

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 dough

  1. Cream together the butter, lard, and sugar.

  2. Add the salt and eggs, then mix in the yeast cake dissolved in warm water.

  3. Gradually add the flour until the batter is quite stiff.

  4. Beat the batter hard and let it rise overnight.

Shape and bake

  1. In the morning, roll the dough to an inch thickness and place it in pie tins.

  2. Let it rise again, then brush with melted butter.

  3. Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 20 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  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
Builds the structure that holds the stiff dough and its gas bubbles.
Yeast cake
Produces gas during the long rise, leavening the dough.
Eggs
Add richness and help bind the dough and give it structure.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor, and browns the top.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and softens its texture.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning to the top.

The step that matters

Beating the batter hard before the overnight rise. Vigorous beating develops the gluten network that traps the gas yeast produces, so the dough rises well and keeps its shape rather than collapsing.

“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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