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Dessert

Cheap Cream Cake

A simple cake with a sweet cream filling made from sugar, milk, flour, and butter.

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.

Prepare 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.

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

  4. Bake until golden brown.

Make the cream

  1. For the cream, beat 1 egg and 1/2 cup sugar together.

  2. Add 1/4 cup flour and a little milk to the egg mixture, then stir into 1/2 pint of boiling milk until thick.

  3. Flavor to taste and let 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

Flour
Provides the structure that sets the batter into a cake crumb as it bakes.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness to the cake and the cream.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and the cream and helps the cake brown.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture to the batter and helps set the crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor in the cake.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and milk into the boiling milk. The starch in the flour must be fully cooked in hot liquid to thicken the cream. Adding the egg mixture too quickly or without enough stirring can cause lumps or scrambling, leaving the cream thin or grainy.

“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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