Skip to main content
Dessert

Jelly Cake

A light cake made with eggs, butter, sugar, flour, and optional baking powder, topped with jelly and dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Jelly 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 batter

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

  2. Separate the eggs and beat the whites until stiff.

  3. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  4. Beat the egg yolks and add them to the butter and sugar mixture.

  5. Gradually add the flour and mix well.

  6. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

  7. Pour the batter into shallow tin pans.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake until golden.

  2. Once cool, spread jelly on top.

  3. Stack layers.

  4. Trim the edges.

  5. Dust powdered sugar over the top before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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
Whipped whites give lift and an airy, delicate crumb, while yolks add richness.
Butter
Creaming with sugar traps air and gives the cake a tender, fine texture.
Sugar
Creamed with butter to aerate the batter and add sweetness and gentle browning.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together once baked.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven to help the layers rise.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air trapped in the whites. Stirring vigorously deflates the batter, which leads to a dense, flat layer.

“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 jelly cake recipes

Lemon 63Apple 32Orange 13Coconut 12Rochester 12Layered 7 See all 153 →

You might also like

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