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Dessert

Lemon Jelly Cake

A baked cake topped with a lemon jelly made from grated lemon, sugar, egg, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Lemon 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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the cake

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

  2. Beat the eggs and sugar until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the butter and milk, mixing well.

  4. Sift together the flour and baking powder, then fold into the mixture.

  5. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake for 25‑30 minutes.

Make the lemon jelly

  1. For the jelly, combine the grated lemon, sugar, egg, and hot water in a saucepan.

  2. Add a walnut‑sized piece of butter and boil until thick.

Finish and serve

  1. Spread the lemon jelly over the cooled cake 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 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
Beaten with sugar to trap air, giving the cake its light structure and set.
Flour
Forms the cake's main structure once its proteins set during baking.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and richness in both cake and jelly.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the cake rise.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and jelly and helps create a fluffy batter.

The step that matters

Boil the lemon jelly until thick. The jelly thickens as the egg and sugar cook together. Undercooking leaves it runny, while overcooking the egg can make it grainy or cause it to scorch on the bottom of the saucepan.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Milletfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

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

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