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Dessert

Boston Cream Cakes

Boston Cream Cakes are baked sponge cakes filled with a lemon-flavored milk and flour custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Boston Cream Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA very quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a very quick oven”. The 400°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the batter

  1. Boil the butter and water together.

  2. Stir in the flour while boiling.

  3. When cool, add the eggs and baking soda.

  4. Drop by the spoonful onto a buttered baking pan, leaving space between each.

Bake the cakes

  1. Bake in a very hot oven (400°F / 200°C) for about 10 minutes.

Fill and flavor

  1. When cold, make an incision at the side of each cake.

  2. Fill with the cream made by boiling milk.

  3. Stir in flour, sugar, and eggs.

  4. Flavor the cream with lemon.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 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).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness to the boiled paste that forms the batter.
Flour
Thickens the boiled paste and gives the cakes their structure.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set during baking to give the cakes structure.
Baking soda
Produces gas in the batter so the cakes rise and open up.
Milk
Forms the base of the cream filling, adding moisture and a dairy flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream filling.

The step that matters

When cool, add the eggs and baking soda.. Eggs added to a very hot paste can scramble and fail to blend. Letting the paste cool first lets the eggs mix in smoothly, which helps the batter hold together and rise evenly in the oven.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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