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Dessert

Cream-cakes for Dessert

A baked cake made from butter, milk, flour, eggs, sugar, baking soda, and lemon flavor.

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 ↓

Cream-cakes for Dessert

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Boil the butter and milk together.

  2. While boiling, add the flour and stir until combined.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then add the eggs and baking soda.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into jelly pans and bake until golden.

Make the cream

  1. For the cream, boil part of the milk and flour together.

  2. Add the cold milk and eggs, then boil for a few minutes.

  3. Flavor the cream with lemon.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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
Forms the structure of the batter and the cream as it sets.
Eggs
Bind the batter and thicken the cream, giving it structure as they set.
Butter
Adds fat, which tenderizes the cake and gives it a richer texture.
Milk
Supplies moisture to the batter and makes the cream smooth and liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown as it bakes.

The step that matters

Add the eggs after the mixture has cooled. If eggs go into a mixture that is still very hot, they can scramble instead of blending smoothly. Letting the mixture cool first keeps the batter smooth and lets the eggs incorporate evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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