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Dessert

Custard Cake

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Custard 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 cake

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

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

  3. Add sugar, eggs, melted butter, and milk to the bowl. Stir briskly for a few minutes.

  4. Pour the batter into a jelly pan and bake until golden.

Make the custard

  1. For the custard, bring 1 pint of milk to a boil.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix 1 egg, ½ cup sugar, and ½ cup flour with a little cold milk until smooth. Stir the mixture into the boiling milk and cook until thickened.

Assemble

  1. Once cool, spread the custard between layers of cake.

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. 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. Flour + sugartop 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the cake crumb as it sets in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise and turn light.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, setting the crumb as they cook.
Melted butter
Adds fat for a tender texture and moist crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown as it bakes.
Milk
Adds moisture to the batter and thickens the custard when heated with flour.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard until thickened. Flour and egg must be stirred smoothly into the boiling milk and cooked long enough for the starch to gelatinise. Undercooked custard stays thin and tastes floury, while stirring too little can leave lumps.

“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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