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Dessert

Cream Batter Cakes

A simple cake made with egg, milk, flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt, cooked on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cream Batter Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg until very light, then add the milk.

  2. Sift together the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar, then add the sifted mixture to the egg mixture.

  3. Beat until smooth.

Cook the cakes

  1. Preheat a griddle with very little grease, preferably a soapstone griddle.

  2. Pour batter onto the griddle.

  3. Cook until half done.

  4. Turn the cakes only once.

  5. If the batter is too stiff, add a spoonful or two of liquid.

  6. If the batter is too thin, sprinkle in a little flour.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour 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

Egg
Adds structure and richness, and helps bind the batter.
Baking powder
Releases gas that makes the cakes rise and become light.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cakes as its proteins set.
Rich sweet milk
Supplies moisture and liquid that hydrates the flour into batter.

The step that matters

Turning the cakes only once. Flipping repeatedly knocks out the gas bubbles forming in the batter and deflates the cakes. Turning once, after the surface has set and the bottom is half cooked, keeps them light.

“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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