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Dessert

Overnight Yeast Batter Cakes

A batter cake made with eggs, sugar, milk, salt, yeast, and flour, left to rise overnight.

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 ↓

Overnight Yeast Batter Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs until light.

  2. Dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm milk.

  3. Combine the eggs, milk, yeast, sugar, salt, and flour.

  4. Beat the mixture hard for about 2 minutes.

  5. Set aside in a warm place overnight in a large bowl to allow rising.

Cook the cakes

  1. In the morning, stir the batter gently without beating.

  2. Bake on a griddle as you would for any batter cakes.

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. Sugar + flourtop 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. Sugar + milktop 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

Eggs
Add structure and richness to the batter.
Yeast
Ferments the batter overnight, causing it to rise and gain a light, airy texture.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the cakes their body and structure.
Sweet milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the flour and dissolves the yeast.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness and browning.

The step that matters

Stir the batter gently in the morning. Yeast has been building gas and gluten has been developing overnight. Beating again would knock out the bubbles and toughen the cakes, so stir only enough to even the batter before it goes on the griddle.

“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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