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Dessert

Delicious Cake Recipe

A cake with a milk custard filling made from butter, sugar, eggs, flour, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Delicious Cake Recipe

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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the batter

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

  2. Cream together the powdered sugar and butter.

  3. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  4. Stir in the milk, baking soda, cream of tartar, and flour until combined.

Bake and cool

  1. Pour the batter into a greased baking pan and bake until golden, about 25-30 minutes.

  2. Let the cake cool completely.

Make the custard filling

  1. For the filling, heat the milk to boiling.

  2. Stir in the cornstarch mixed with a little cold milk.

  3. Take out a little of the mixture and mix it with the beaten egg and sugar, then return it to the pot.

  4. Cook until thickened, then add flavoring and let cool before spreading between the cake layers.

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. 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, and set as the batter bakes.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and rich flavor in the cake.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that lifts the cake.
Cream of tartar
Acts as an acid with baking soda, helping the cake rise and stay light.
Cornstarch
Thickens the milk mixture into a smooth custard when heated.

The step that matters

Adding the egg mixture to the hot custard. Eggs scramble if they meet very hot milk directly. Mixing a little hot custard into the beaten egg first gently raises its temperature, so it blends in smoothly when returned to the pot.

“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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