Skip to main content
Dessert

Cheap Cream Cake

A simple layered cake with a sweet cream filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Cheap 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 1 cup sugar, 1 egg, 1 cup sweet milk, 2 cups all-purpose flour, 2 tablespoons butter, and 2 heaping teaspoons baking powder.

  3. Divide the batter into three parts and pour into round shallow pans.

Make the cream

  1. For the cream, beat 1 egg and 1/2 cup sugar together.

  2. Add 1/4 cup flour and a little milk to the egg mixture, then stir into 1/2 pint boiling milk until thick.

  3. Flavor the cream to taste and let it cool.

Assemble

  1. Spread the cooled cream between the baked 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. 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. Flour + buttertop 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).

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 thicken the cream as they set with heat.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the cake and thickens the cream when cooked.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the layers rise and turn light.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the cake crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps brown the layers while baking.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture to the batter and helps set the crumb.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into boiling milk. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated in liquid, so adding it to boiling milk too slowly or without stirring can leave lumps. Stirring while the cream thickens keeps it smooth and evenly set.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes