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Dessert

Lemon Filled Cake

A butter and sugar cake with a lemon-flavored filling made from sugar, flour, egg, butter, and lemon juice and zest.

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 ↓

Lemon Filled 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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, cream together the butter and 1½ cups sugar until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the milk and mix well.

  3. Sift together the flour and baking powder, then gradually add to the mixture.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, combine 1 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons flour, the egg, 1 teaspoon butter, and the juice and grated rind of 2 lemons in a saucepan.

  2. Cook the filling over medium heat, stirring constantly until it reaches the boiling point.

Bake

  1. Pour the filling into the cake batter and bake until golden brown.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake and thickens the filling.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise and turn light.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air, giving a tender, rich crumb.
Egg
Thickens the filling as it heats and adds richness and structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the batter brown and stay tender.
Lemons
Juice adds sharp acidity and the grated rind adds bright lemon aroma.

The step that matters

Cooking the filling over medium heat while stirring constantly. Egg proteins set and can curdle or scramble if the mixture overheats or sits still. Constant stirring spreads heat evenly, while the flour starch thickens the filling smoothly as it approaches boiling.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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