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Dessert

French Cream Cake

A cake made with a batter of flour, sugar, eggs, and baking powder, filled with a warm milk and egg custard, topped with frosting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

French Cream Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix sugar, flour, baking powder, and salt.

  3. In another bowl, beat the eggs and add cold water.

  4. Combine the wet and dry ingredients and mix well.

  5. Pour the batter into a round pie plate.

  6. Bake the batter until golden.

Make the cream filling

  1. While the cake cools, prepare the cream filling.

  2. In a double boiler, heat milk and sugar until warm.

  3. In a separate bowl, whisk eggs and cornstarch together.

  4. Gradually add the egg mixture to the warm milk, stirring constantly.

  5. Cook the mixture until thickened.

  6. Remove the mixture from heat and stir in butter.

Assemble and frost

  1. Once the cake is cool, split it.

  2. Fill the cake with the cream.

  3. Frost the top with your choice of frosting.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 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).

Flour and butter 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 batter and, when cooked with milk, thicken the cream filling.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Cornstarch
Thickens the cream filling as it heats with the milk and sugar.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream filling, adding richness and body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the finished cream filling.

The step that matters

Gradually add the egg mixture to the warm milk, stirring constantly. Adding the eggs too fast or without constant stirring can scramble them. Stirring keeps the egg proteins dispersed while the starch thickens the custard smoothly.

“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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