Skip to main content
Dessert

Martha Washington Cake

A layered cake with custard filling made from sugar, milk, flour, eggs, and butter.

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

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 ↓

Martha Washington 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 the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix sugar, sweet milk, flour, egg, baking powder, and butter until smooth.

  3. Divide the batter into three layers and bake until golden.

Make the custard

  1. For the custard, scald the milk in a saucepan.

  2. In a separate bowl, beat together the sugar, flour, egg, and corn starch.

  3. Add the beaten mixture to the scalded milk and boil until thick.

  4. Flavor the custard as desired and let it cool.

Assemble

  1. Spread the cooled custard between the layers of cake.

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

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

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 enrich the custard, helping it set and giving structure to the cake.
Flour
Provides the structure of the cake and thickens the custard as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer crumb in the cake.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and custard and contributes to browning of the layers.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the layers rise and become light.
Corn starch
Thickens the custard so it holds its shape between the layers.

The step that matters

Boil the custard until thick. Starch in the flour and corn starch only thickens fully when it reaches a boil and is stirred. Undercooked custard stays thin and runny and will not hold between the cake layers.

“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.

You might also like

Corn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesCorn CakesCorn Cakes22 recipesGreen Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding14 recipes