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Dessert

Short Cake Cookies

A buttery cookie made with sugar, butter, flour, baking powder, eggs, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,341 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Short Cake Cookies

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 the dough

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

  2. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  3. Mix in the flour and baking powder.

  4. Add the beaten raw eggs and mix well.

  5. Grate the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs and fold them into the mixture, discarding the whites.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into small cakes using your hands.

  2. Place the cakes on a baking sheet.

  3. Beat the reserved egg white and add sugar to it.

  4. Put a little of the sweetened egg white in the center of each cake and sprinkle with cinnamon.

  5. Bake until golden 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. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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. Butter + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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
Forms the structure that holds the dough together and lets the cakes keep their shape.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the cookies tender and rich.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps it brown in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking to lift the cakes slightly.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure.

The step that matters

Bake until golden brown. Sugar and proteins brown through heat-driven reactions, so color signals doneness. Overbaking dries the cakes and makes them hard, while underbaking leaves the dough pale and soft in the center.

Swap the cinnamon

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

  1. Cinnamonthe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

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