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Dessert

Noel Cup Cakes

Noel Cup Cakes are small butter cakes with sugar, milk, flour, egg whites, baking powder, flavored with extract, iced with Jiffy Icing, topped with gumdrops.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Noel Cup Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter until soft.

  2. Combine with sugar and beat until frothy using the hot water method.

  3. Sift the flour and baking powder together three times.

  4. Add the flour mixture alternately with the milk to the creamed mixture.

  5. Beat for 2 minutes.

  6. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

  7. Do not beat after adding the egg whites.

Bake and decorate

  1. Bake in greased muffin tins.

  2. Ice with a thick covering of Jiffy Icing.

  3. Place a large gumdrop on top of each cake and arrange silver candies around the gumdrop.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Provides the structure that holds the cakes together as they bake.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the batter brown and stay tender.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in, they trap air that helps the cakes rise and set.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, lifting the batter so the cakes rise.
Milk
Adds moisture that hydrates the flour and keeps the crumb soft.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites and stopping there. Whipped egg whites hold air that lifts the batter. Folding gently keeps that air in, while further beating deflates the foam and works the flour's gluten, making the cakes denser and tougher.

“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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