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Dessert

Excellent Breakfast Cakes

A quick, lightly leavened cake made with flour, lard, milk, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and walnut are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,873 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Excellent Breakfast Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix baking powder and flour in a bowl.

  2. Add lard and salt, then mix lightly.

  3. Gradually add cold milk until moistened.

Shape and cook

  1. Roll out the dough to ½ inch thickness.

  2. Cut into cakes using a dredging box.

  3. Cook immediately on a hot griddle or in a warm oven.

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 + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Walnut + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,236 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the cakes as its proteins hydrate into dough.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the cakes rise and become light.
Lard
Coats flour particles and adds fat, giving the cakes a tender, short texture.
Cold milk
Hydrates the flour to bind the dough, and its moisture turns to steam during cooking.

The step that matters

Mix lightly after adding the lard and salt. Overmixing develops gluten in the flour and makes the cakes tough. Light mixing keeps the lard in small pieces, which gives a tender, flaky crumb.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Milletfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk. 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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