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Dessert

Clay Cake

A sweet cake made with butter, sugar, milk, flour, eggs, cream of tartar, baking soda, and lemon extract.

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

Clay 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 batter

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

  2. In a bowl, cream the butter and sugar until it resembles whipped cream.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks until well combined.

  4. In another bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  5. Add the beaten yolks and flour to the creamed mixture, mixing well.

  6. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour the batter into two cake pans and bake until golden brown.

  2. For variety, change the flavoring or add fruit to one cake.

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. 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. Butter + flourtop 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).

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

Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the batter, while whipped whites add lift and a light, airy crumb.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and adds richness and a tender texture.
Sugar
Creaming with butter aerates the batter and sweetens the cake while helping it brown.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that helps the cake rise.
Cream of tartar
Stabilizes the whipped egg whites so they hold their peaks longer.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the beaten egg whites. Whipped egg whites hold the air that lifts the cake. Vigorous stirring deflates them, leaving a dense, flat cake.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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