Skip to main content
Baking

Cheap Cream Cake

A simple cake made with sugar, egg, milk, flour, butter, baking powder, and flavored, topped with a sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the cake

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

  2. In a bowl, mix sugar, egg, sweet milk, flour, butter, baking powder, and flavoring until smooth.

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

  4. Bake until golden brown.

Make the cream

  1. For the cream, beat the egg and sugar together.

  2. Add flour and a little milk to the mixture, then stir into the boiling milk until thick.

  3. Let the cream cool, then spread it between the baked cakes.

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

Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake crumb and thickens the cream.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add richness and structure to the cake and cream.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown and the cream thicken smoothly.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cakes rise and become light.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor in the cake.
Sweet milk
Provides moisture and liquid that hydrates the flour in the batter.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the boiling milk. Flour thickens the cream only when it is heated in liquid, and adding it to boiling milk while stirring keeps it smooth. Stopping early or letting it sit leaves lumps or a thin cream that will not hold between the cakes.

“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.

More cream cake recipes

Ice 127Sour 42Almond 41Whipped 36Boston 35French 34 See all 226 →

You might also like

Delicate CakeDelicate Cake246 recipesBoiled FrostingBoiled Frosting69 recipesCitron CakeCitron Cake68 recipesScotch CakeScotch Cake63 recipes