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Dessert

Cheap Cream Cake

A simple cake made with sugar, sweet milk, flour, egg, butter, baking powder, and a boiled milk filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Cheap Cream 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 the cake batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix sugar, sweet milk, flour, egg, butter, and baking powder until smooth.

Bake the cake

  1. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans and bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, beat one egg and mix with sugar and flour in a separate bowl.

  2. Stir this mixture into the boiling milk and cook until thickened.

  3. Add flavoring to the filling and let it cool before using.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake crumb and thickens the filling.
Egg
Binds the batter and, in the filling, thickens the custard as it cooks.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and gives a richer flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown as it bakes.
Milk
Adds moisture to the batter and forms the base of the cooked filling.

The step that matters

Stir the egg mixture into the boiling milk and cook until thickened. Adding the egg and flour mixture to hot milk can cause lumps or scrambling if it is not stirred constantly. Cooking until thickened lets the starch gelatinize and the egg set, giving a smooth, stable filling.

“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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