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Dessert

Cheap Cream Cake

A simple cake made with sugar, egg, milk, flour, butter, baking powder, and topped with a sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cheap Cream 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 cake

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

  2. In a bowl, mix 1 cup sugar, 1 egg, 1 cup sweet milk, 2 cups flour, 1 tablespoon butter, and 2 heaping teaspoons baking powder until smooth.

  3. Divide the batter into three parts and pour into round shallow pans.

  4. Bake until golden brown.

Make the cream

  1. Beat 1 egg and 1/2 cup sugar together.

  2. Add 1/4 cup flour and a little milk to the egg mixture.

  3. Stir the mixture into 1/2 pint boiling milk until thick.

  4. Flavor the cream to taste.

  5. Let the cream cool.

Assemble

  1. Spread the cream between the baked cake layers.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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
Bind the batter and thicken the cream when heated with milk.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake layers and cream together.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the layers rise and turn light.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the layers brown in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the cake.
Sweet milk
Supplies liquid that hydrates the flour and gives the batter moisture.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture into boiling milk until thick. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated in liquid, so the cream must be stirred steadily until it thickens. Undercooked flour leaves a raw, pasty taste and a thin filling that will not hold between the layers.

“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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