Skip to main content
Dessert

Strawberry Short Cake

A layered cake made with flour, butter, ice-cold water, strawberries, sugar, fine sugar, and sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Strawberry Short Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix together the flour and butter until crumbly.

  2. Add the ice-cold water and mix until just combined.

  3. Roll out the dough like pastry, handling it as little as possible.

Assemble and bake

  1. Cover two large dinner plates with the rolled dough.

  2. Fill each plate with fresh strawberries sweetened with sugar.

  3. Layer the plates on top of each other until three layers are filled.

  4. Place a final layer of dough on top and bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 5-6 minutes.

  5. Sprinkle fine sugar over the top layer.

Serve

  1. Serve with sweet cream.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

All-purpose flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure.
Butter
Coats flour particles and creates fat pockets that keep the dough tender and flaky.
Ice-cold water
Hydrates the flour to bind the dough, and staying cold keeps the butter firm.
Fresh strawberries
Provide fruit moisture and flavor that soften the shortcake layers.
Sugar
Sweetens the strawberries and draws out their juice.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and a cool contrast to the warm baked dough.

The step that matters

Handle the dough as little as possible. Overworking dough develops excess gluten, which makes the baked shortcake tough and dense instead of tender and crumbly.

“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 strawberry shortcake recipes

Sauce 6 See all 339 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes