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Dessert

Cocoa-nut Tea Cakes

A sweet cake made with sugar, butter, eggs, and grated cocoa nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cocoa and nuts work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 65 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Cocoa-nut Tea 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).

Make the dough

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the beaten eggs gradually, mixing well.

  3. Fold in the grated cocoa nuts.

  4. Roll out the dough and cut into desired shapes.

Bake

  1. Bake in the preheated oven 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. Cocoa + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together65 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Butter + cocoatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together548 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-undecalactone (coconut, creamy).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Butter + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,291 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure as they set in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat and tenderness, and helps the creamed mixture hold air for a light texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the cakes and, creamed with butter, helps create a light, fluffy base.
Grated cocoa nuts
Add flavour and body to the dough.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten eggs gradually. Adding eggs slowly while mixing lets the emulsion form smoothly. Adding them all at once can break the creamed butter and sugar, which can make the dough greasy and dense.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pecansfits about as well
  3. Nutsthe original
  4. Walnutfits about as well

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