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Dessert

Lemon Jelly Cake

A lemon-flavored cake layered with lemon jelly.

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.

Prepare the cake

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

  2. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  3. Add the flour, milk, baking powder, and beaten eggs. Mix well.

  4. Pour the batter into sheets or jelly tins and bake until golden.

Make the lemon jelly

  1. For the jelly, combine 1 cup sugar, 1 egg, lemon rind, lemon juice, water, and flour in a kettle.

  2. Place the kettle in boiling water and stir until thickened.

Assemble

  1. Once cool, spread the jelly between the baked cakes.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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
Bind the batter and help set the structure of the cake layers as they bake.
Butter
Creaming with sugar traps air and adds fat for a tender crumb.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake and thickens the lemon jelly as it cooks.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, with butter, helps create a tender texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright flavour to the lemon jelly filling.

The step that matters

Stirring the lemon jelly until thickened. The egg and flour in the filling thicken as they heat, but if the mixture is not stirred constantly over the boiling water it can lump or scorch on the bottom. Stirring keeps it smooth and evenly set.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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