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Dessert

Robert Lee Jelly Cake

A cake made with eggs, butter, sugar, flour, lemon and orange, topped with a sweet icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Robert Lee Jelly 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 oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  3. Add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  4. Gradually add flour and lemon juice, mixing until smooth.

  5. Pour batter into prepared cake pans and bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

Make the icing and finish

  1. Beat egg whites to stiff peaks, then gradually add sugar.

  2. Mix in rind and juice of orange and lemon.

  3. Let cake cool completely before spreading icing on top.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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
Add structure and richness, and help the batter bind and rise.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a light, fluffy texture when creamed.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright flavor to the batter.

The step that matters

Let cake cool completely before spreading icing on top.. Spreading icing on a warm cake makes it melt and slide off, and can leave the cake crumbly and soft. Full cooling lets the crumb firm up so the icing sets in place.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

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

More jelly cake recipes

Lemon 63Apple 32Orange 13Coconut 12Rochester 12Layered 7 See all 153 →

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