Skip to main content
Dessert

Vienna Cream Cake

A layered cake made with eggs, sugar, flour, butter, baking powder, lemon juice, sour cream, sugar, and hickory nuts.

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

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Vienna 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 the eggs and mix in 1 cup of sugar until well combined.

  3. Add 1 cup of flour, 1 tablespoon of melted butter, 3 teaspoons of baking powder, and 1 teaspoon of lemon juice. Mix until smooth.

  4. Pour the batter into jelly tins and bake until golden.

Make the cream

  1. For the cream, combine 1 cup of thick sour cream, 1 cup of sugar, and ½ cup of finely chopped hickory nuts in a saucepan.

  2. Cook over medium heat, stirring, for 5 minutes until slightly thickened.

Assemble

  1. Spread the cream between the layers of the 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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 lift to the sponge batter as they are beaten.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and tang, and thickens the cream filling when cooked.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and cream and helps the cream thicken and set.

The step that matters

Cooking the cream until slightly thickened. Sour cream can curdle or turn grainy if overheated, and under-cooking leaves the filling runny. Stirring over medium heat keeps it smooth and lets it thicken enough to hold between the layers.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, flour, butter, cream, meat. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes