Skip to main content
Dessert

Jelly Cake

A cake made with a batter of sugar, butter, sweet milk, flour, eggs, baking powder, topped with a lemon jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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

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 batter

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cream sugar and butter together.

  3. Add sweet milk and mix well.

  4. Beat egg whites and yolks separately.

  5. Combine beaten yolks with the sugar mixture.

  6. Sift flour and baking powder, then add to the mixture.

  7. Fold in beaten egg whites gently.

Bake and make the jelly

  1. Pour batter into a prepared cake pan and bake until golden.

  2. For the jelly, combine 1 cup sugar, 1 egg, grated lemon rind, lemon juice, water, and flour in a bowl.

  3. Place mixture in a kettle of boiling water and stir until it comes to a boil.

Assemble

  1. Once cake is ready, assemble it with the jelly.

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 + flourtop 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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Eggs
Whites trapped by beating add lift and an airy crumb, while yolks add richness and color.
Butter
Creaming with sugar traps air and adds fat for a tender, moist texture.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten network that gives the cake its structure as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the batter rise and lighten.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps tenderize the crumb while creaming with butter.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright flavor to the jelly filling.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Egg whites hold air bubbles that give lift. Stirring vigorously deflates them, so fold gently with a spatula until just combined for a light cake.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More jelly cake recipes

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes