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Dessert

Lemon Cake

A lemon cake with a lemon filling made from sugar, flour, and hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Lemon Cake

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 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 cake

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the milk, half of the flour, and the beaten yolks of the eggs. Beat for 10 minutes.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites and the remaining flour with the baking powder sifted in.

  4. Bake in a quick oven at 400°F (200°C) until soft.

Make the filling and assemble

  1. For the filling, mix hot water, sugar, and flour.

  2. Add one beaten egg, lemon juice, and grated lemon rind. Boil until thickened. Let it cool.

  3. Spread 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Flour + milktop 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

Eggs
Yolks add richness and structure, while whipped whites trap air that lifts the cake.
Butter
Fat that tenderises the crumb and carries flavour.
Flour
Starch and gluten set during baking to give the cake its structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the cake rise and become light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps keep it moist and tender.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavour to the filling.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Whites hold the air that makes the cake rise. Folding gently keeps that air in; stirring hard deflates the batter and yields a flatter, denser cake.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More lemon cake recipes

Filling 16Almond 5Apple 5with Lemon Jelly 5Raisin 4Italian 3 See all 364 →

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