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Dessert

Lemon Layer Cake

A layered cake with lemon-flavored batter, lemon filling, coconut topping, and egg white frosting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 306 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Lemon Layer 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 layers

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

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

  3. Beat the egg whites separately and fold them into the batter last.

  4. Divide the batter into four layers and bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, boil 1 cup of sugar and 1 cup of water.

  2. Thicken the mixture with 1 teaspoon of corn starch.

  3. Once cool, add the juice and grated rind of 1 lemon.

Assemble and frost

  1. Sprinkle each layer with coconut before stacking.

  2. Make a soft frosting with the egg white and top the cake with it.

  3. Sprinkle additional coconut on the frosting.

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. Corn + coconuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together306 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

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

  3. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Add structure to the batter and lift when beaten whites are folded in.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake layers together.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the layers rise and stay light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps the layers brown while baking.
Corn starch
Thickens the lemon filling so it sets rather than running.
Lemon
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavour to the filling.

The step that matters

Add the lemon juice and rind only once the filling has cooled. Corn starch thickens when heated and sets as it cools; adding acidic lemon juice while the mixture is still hot can thin it and weaken the set, so cooling first keeps the filling thick.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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