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Dessert

Jelly Cake

A layered cake with a lemon jelly filling, made from a batter of sugar, eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, and lemon zest.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

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. In a bowl, mix 1½ cups sugar and 2 eggs. Add ½ cup rich milk and mix well.

  3. Sift in 2 teaspoons baking powder and 2 cups flour, then combine.

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

Make the lemon jelly and assemble

  1. For the lemon jelly, cook the lemon rind and juice, 1 egg, 1 tablespoon water, 1 cup sugar, and 1 teaspoon corn starch until slightly thick.

  2. Once cooled, spread the lemon jelly between the cake layers.

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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lemon + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Bind the batter and add structure and richness to the cake layers.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the layers rise and turn light.
Flour
Forms the main structure that holds the cake layers together.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown as it bakes.
Corn starch
Thickens the lemon filling so it sets to a spreadable consistency.

The step that matters

Cooking the lemon jelly until slightly thick. Corn starch thickens only when heated, and the mixture with egg must be cooked gently, stirring, so it thickens without scrambling. Undercooking leaves it runny; overheating can curdle the egg and make it grainy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More jelly cake recipes

Lemon 63Apple 32Orange 13Coconut 12Rochester 12Layered 7 See all 153 →

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