Skip to main content
Dessert

Apple Jelly Cake

A cake made with grated apples, lemon, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder, butter, and sweet milk, filled with cooled apple mixture.

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

Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Apple Jelly Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Grate the apples and combine with lemon juice, lemon rind, sugar, and beaten egg in a tin basin.

  2. Simmer the mixture, stirring constantly, until cooked, then set aside to cool.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg whites and yolks separately.

  2. Mix the butter and sugar together, then add milk.

  3. Combine the butter mixture with flour and baking powder.

  4. Divide the batter into four equal parts and pour into baking tins or jelly pans.

Assemble

  1. Use the cooled apple mixture as a filling while the cake is still hot.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Apple + milktop 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. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

  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

Apples
Provide moisture and tart flavour that forms the cooked fruit filling.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, with beaten whites helping the cake rise and set.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich crumb in the batter.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake batter as it sets in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas to lift the batter so the layers rise.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown and keep moisture.

The step that matters

Simmer the apple mixture until cooked. The apple mixture must be cooked through and cooled before use. Stirring constantly prevents the egg and sugar from scorching or curdling on the base of the pan, and cooling keeps the filling from soaking into the hot cake layers unevenly.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, egg, milk, butter, flour. 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 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes