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Dessert

Beaten Cream Cake

A layered cake made with butter, sugar, egg whites, flour, baking powder, milk, and topped with sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Beaten 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, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the egg whites and mix well.

  4. In a separate bowl, combine the flour and baking powder.

  5. Gradually add the flour mixture and milk to the butter mixture, alternating between the two.

Bake and assemble

  1. Divide the batter into three layers and bake until golden.

  2. Once baked, layer the cakes and spread thick sweet cream mixed with pulverized sugar between them.

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

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 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. Milk + flourtop 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

Butter
Adds richness and a tender crumb when creamed with sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps trap air when creamed with butter.
Egg whites
Add structure and help bind the batter as it sets.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the layers rise.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter.

The step that matters

Creaming the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beating air into the butter and sugar creates tiny bubbles that expand in the oven and lighten the crumb. Under-beating leaves a dense cake, while the mixture should be beaten until pale and fluffy before the other ingredients are added.

“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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