Skip to main content
Dessert

Cream Cake

A layered cake with a sweet milk and corn starch cream filling flavored with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Cream 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.

Make the cake

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix 1 cup sugar, 3 eggs, 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, and 1 tablespoon butter until smooth.

  3. Pour batter into layers and bake until golden.

Make the cream filling

  1. Combine 1 pint sweet milk, 2 eggs, ⅔ cup sugar, and 2 large tablespoons corn starch in a saucepan.

  2. Cook mixture over medium heat until thickened, then remove from heat and let cool.

  3. Once cooled, add ½ cup butter and flavor with lemon.

Assemble

  1. Spread cream filling between cake layers.

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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and, with the milk, thicken the cream filling as it cooks.
Corn starch
Thickens the cream filling so it sets firm enough to spread between layers.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the cake and smoothness to the cream filling.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake layers rise and become light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and the cream filling and helps the layers brown.

The step that matters

Cook the cream filling until thickened. Cornstarch thickens only when the mixture reaches a full simmer and stays hot long enough. Undercooked filling stays runny and will soak into the cake layers instead of holding between them.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

Ice 127Sour 42Almond 41Whipped 36Boston 35French 34 See all 226 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesCorn CakeCorn Cake90 recipes