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Dessert

Apple Jelly Cake

A layered cake with a boiled apple filling, made with butter, sugar, eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, and apples.

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

Apple Jelly Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the butter and sugar.

  2. Add the egg yolks and mix well.

  3. Stir in the milk, baking powder, and flour until combined.

Make the filling

  1. In a separate pot, combine the grated apples, lemon juice and peel, sugar, and beaten egg.

  2. Boil the apple mixture, stirring constantly, until thick.

  3. Cool the filling and use it to fill the cake layers.

Bake

  1. Bake the cake in layers until golden.

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. Milk + appletop 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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and structure; the beaten egg thickens the apple filling as it cooks.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure once its proteins set in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Apples
Provide moisture, tartness, and bulk to the filling once cooked down.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and the filling and helps the filling thicken into a jelly-like texture.

The step that matters

Boil the apple mixture until thick. Stirring constantly prevents the egg and sugar from scorching or curdling on the pan base, and the filling only sets to a spreadable jelly once it has reached a thick consistency. Cooling fully before filling keeps the layers from soaking or sliding.

Swap the apple

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

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

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