Skip to main content
Dessert

Boston Cream Cakes

A layered cake with a butter‑flour batter and a lemon‑flavored cream filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Boston Cream Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the choux dough

  1. Boil the water with the butter in it.

  2. Stir in the flour while it boils until combined.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then add the baking soda and beaten eggs.

  4. Drop the mixture onto buttered pans using a dessert spoon.

Bake and make the cream

  1. Bake for 20 minutes at 400°F (200°C).

  2. For the cream, beat together the flour, sugar, and eggs.

  3. Stir this mixture into boiling milk.

  4. Once scalded, let it cool and flavor with lemon.

Fill and serve

  1. When the cakes are cool, cut them open and fill with the cream.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Bind the dough and set the custard, giving structure as they cook.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and melts into the boiling water to start the dough.
Flour
Forms the starch structure of the dough and thickens the cream.
Baking soda
Helps the dough puff and lighten as it bakes.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream, which thickens as it heats.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and adds body to its texture.

The step that matters

Stir the flour into the boiling water until combined. Cooking the flour paste briefly in boiling liquid gelatinizes its starch, so the dough can hold its shape and puff rather than spreading flat.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes