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Dessert

Cream Cake

A currant cake made with sweet cream, sugar, currants, and Graham flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cream Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine sweet cream, white sugar, and English currants.

  2. Gradually add Graham flour until you achieve a thin batter.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into muffin rings or gem tins, filling them only half full.

  2. Bake until golden and a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  4. Currant + flourtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes
  5. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Sweet cream
Provides richness and moisture, giving the batter a tender crumb.
Graham flour
Forms the batter's structure as it thickens and sets during baking.
English currants
Add tart fruitiness and bursts of flavour throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Filling the tins only half full. Batter rises in the oven as its air and steam expand. Filling the tins halfway leaves room for this rise, so the cakes do not overflow or bake up dense at the rim.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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