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Dessert

Cream Cake

A cake made from eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, and a sweet milk cream with butter and lemon flavoring.

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

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 cake

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

  2. In a bowl, beat 3 eggs and mix in 1 cup of sugar until well combined.

  3. Add 1 ½ cups of flour, 2 tablespoons of cold water, and 2 teaspoons of baking powder. Mix until smooth.

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

Make the cream

  1. For the cream, combine 1 pint of sweet milk, 2 eggs, ⅔ cup of sugar, 2 large tablespoons of corn starch, and ½ cup of butter in a saucepan.

  2. Cook the mixture over medium heat, stirring constantly until thickened. Remove from heat and let cool.

Assemble

  1. Once the cream is cool, flavor it with lemon and spread it over the cooled 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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 structure and help the cake batter set as it bakes.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Corn starch
Thickens the cream as it heats, giving it a smooth, spreadable body.
Butter
Adds richness and a soft, tender mouthfeel to the cream.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.

The step that matters

Cook the cream until thickened. Corn starch only thickens once heated, and it must be stirred constantly so it does not scorch or form lumps. Stop once it is thick, since overcooking can thin it again.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, flour, milk, corn, 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.

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