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Dessert

Cream Cake

A cake baked from a batter of sugar, flour, eggs, butter, baking powder, and milk, topped with cream of milk, egg whites, cornstarch, and sugar.

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

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, mix 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, 4 eggs, ¼ cup butter, and 1 teaspoon baking powder until smooth.

  3. Pour the batter into jelly-cake pans.

  4. Bake until golden.

Make the cream

  1. For the cream, scald 1½ cups milk in a saucepan.

  2. In a separate bowl, combine 2 egg whites, 1 tablespoon cornstarch, and ½ cup sugar.

  3. Gradually add the hot milk to the egg mixture, stirring constantly.

  4. Add flavoring to taste and mix well.

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. 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. Flour + milktop 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
Provide structure and richness to the cake batter as they set during baking.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake as its proteins set with heat.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer crumb in the cake.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Milk
Adds moisture and body to the cream as it thickens.
Cornstarch
Thickens the cream when heated with the milk and egg whites.

The step that matters

Gradually add the hot milk to the egg mixture, stirring constantly.. Adding hot milk too fast can heat the egg whites unevenly and cause lumps or curdling. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly, so the cornstarch thickens into a smooth cream.

“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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