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Dessert

Lemon Jelly Cake

A cake with a lemon jelly filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Lemon Jelly 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. Cream together the granulated sugar and butter.

  3. Add the milk, flour, eggs, baking soda, cream of tartar, and lemon extract. Mix well.

  4. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans.

  5. Bake until golden.

Make the filling and assemble

  1. Combine 1 cup of sugar, grated rind and juice of 1 lemon, water, and 1 teaspoon of flour in a saucepan to make the lemon filling.

  2. Boil the mixture until it thickens.

  3. Cool the mixture.

  4. Spread the lemon filling 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. 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 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
Creams with sugar to give the cake tenderness and a rich texture.
Eggs
Provide structure and richness, helping the batter set as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the cream of tartar to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter so baking soda reacts and helps the cake rise and stay tender.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown and stay moist.

The step that matters

Boil the lemon filling until it thickens. The filling thickens as the flour and sugar mixture is heated, and starch needs to boil to fully thicken. If it is undercooked it stays runny and soaks into the cake layers; the cooling step then lets it set.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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