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Dessert

Jelly Cake

A cake made with eggs, flour, sugar, butter, baking soda, tartaric acid, and a lemon jelly topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Jelly Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cake

  1. Beat the eggs very light.

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  3. Add the flour, tartaric acid, and baking soda, mixing well.

  4. Bake in thin pans.

Make the jelly and assemble

  1. For the jelly, combine butter, sugar, yolks, lemon juice, and rind in a saucepan, then heat until it boils.

  2. Spread jelly on top while warm.

  3. Spread between the 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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
Beaten eggs add air and structure, helping the thin cake layers rise and hold together.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake crumb as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in both the cake and the jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, in the jelly, helps it thicken into a spreadable filling.
Tartaric acid
Reacts with baking soda to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid to release carbon dioxide, helping the cake rise.

The step that matters

Heat the jelly until it boils. The jelly is made from egg yolks, which can curdle or scramble if overheated. Bringing it to a boil while stirring thickens it evenly into a smooth spread.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, flour, sugar, butter):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, sugar, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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 jelly cake recipes

Lemon 63Apple 32Orange 13Coconut 12Rochester 12Layered 7 See all 153 →

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