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Dessert

Apple Cake with Cream

A baked apple cake layered with a lemony apple filling.

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

Apple Cake with Cream

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. Cream the butter and powdered sugar together.

  3. Add the sweet milk to the creamed mixture.

  4. In a separate bowl, combine the corn-starch and flour, then add them alternately with the whipped egg whites to the creamed mixture.

  5. Pour the batter into jelly-cake tins and bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, beat the egg yolks, sugar, and lemon juice together.

  2. Grate the apples directly into the mixture and stir.

  3. Place the mixture in a double boiler and stir until it reaches a boil.

  4. Once cooled, spread the filling between the baked cakes.

Serve

  1. Serve fresh with cream.

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 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

Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they lighten the batter and help it rise.
Butter
Creamed with the sugar, it adds richness and a tender crumb.
Corn-starch
Softens the crumb and gives a fine, delicate texture.
Egg yolks
Thicken the filling as it cooks and add richness.
Apples
Add moisture, tartness and fruit flavour to the filling.
Lemon
Its juice adds acidity that brightens the sweet filling.

The step that matters

Cooking the filling in a double boiler. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble if heated too quickly. Gentle, indirect heat while stirring lets them thicken smoothly into a custard-like filling.

Swap the apple

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

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

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