Skip to main content
Dessert

Jelly Cake- Apple

A butter and sugar cake with a baked apple filling, topped with sifted sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Jelly Cake- Apple

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the eggs, flour, ammonia, and milk.

  3. Mix to a rather thin batter.

  4. Bake in greased jelly cake tins.

Make the apple filling

  1. Peel and slice the apples, then cook them with 1½ lb sugar until tender.

  2. Remove from heat, rub the apples through a fine sieve, and mix in a little butter.

Assemble and finish

  1. Once cooled, spread the apple mixture between the layers of the cake.

  2. Sprinkle the top with sifted sugar.

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. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Flour
Forms the cake's structure as the batter sets in the tins.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the batter bind and rise.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender texture when creamed with butter.
Ammonia
Acts as a leavening agent, releasing gas as the cake bakes so it lightens.
Apples
Provide moisture, sweetness and tartness to the filling that sits between the layers.

The step that matters

Spread the filling only once the apples have cooled. Spreading warm apple mixture onto the cake layers can soften and soak into the crumb, making the layers slide or turn soggy and hard to stack evenly.

Swap the apple

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

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

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

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesDried Apple CakeDried Apple Cake51 recipes