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Dessert

Cream Cake

A cake made with a butter‑sugar batter and a cooled milk‑butter‑sugar cream filling.

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 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 cream

  1. Combine milk, butter, and powdered sugar in a saucepan and bring to a boil.

  2. Mix corn starch with a little cold milk, then add to the boiling mixture and stir briskly while boiling for 3 to 5 minutes.

  3. Let the mixture cool and flavor to taste.

Bake and assemble

  1. Cream together sugar and butter, then add eggs, flour, corn starch, and baking powder and mix well.

  2. Pour batter into jelly‑cake tins and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

  3. Assemble the cake by layering it with the cream mixture instead of jelly, one hour before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

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
Provide structure and richness to the batter as they set during baking.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake batter.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and rich flavor in both the batter and the cream.
Corn starch
Thickens the cream mixture as it boils and adds tenderness to the batter.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the cream and helps give it a smooth texture.

The step that matters

Stirring the cornstarch mixture while boiling. Cornstarch must be fully boiling and stirred constantly so its starch granules swell and gelatinize evenly. Stopping early or stirring poorly leaves the cream thin or lumpy.

“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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