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Dessert

Cream Cake

A layered cake made with beaten egg whites, butter, sugar, milk, flour, baking powder, and a boiled cream of yolks, milk, sugar, cornstarch, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

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.

Make the cake batter

  1. Beat the egg whites until very light.

  2. In a separate bowl, cream together the butter and sugar.

  3. Add 1 cup of milk, flour, and baking powder to the butter mixture.

  4. Stir in the beaten egg whites.

Make the cream

  1. Beat the egg yolks for the cream.

  2. Add 1 cup of milk, ½ cup of sugar, cornstarch, and butter to the yolks.

  3. Boil the mixture.

  4. Flavor the cream to taste when cool.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake the batter in layers at 350°F (175°C).

  2. Do not spread the cream on the layers until it is cool.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Egg whites
Beaten to foam, they lighten the batter and help the cake rise and set with an open crumb.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and adds richness and tenderness to the cake.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps hold air for a lighter texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets as the batter bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the layers rise.
Egg yolks
Thicken the cream as they cook with the milk and add richness.

The step that matters

Boil the cream mixture. The cream must be cooked long enough for the starch to gelatinize and thicken it; stopping early leaves it runny, while overcooking can scorch the milk and egg yolks.

“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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