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Dessert

Apple Jelly Cake

A layered cake made with butter, sugar, sweet milk, flour, eggs, baking powder, and apple jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Apple Jelly Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cake

  1. Cream together the butter and sugar.

  2. Add the sweet milk, flour, eggs, and baking powder; mix well.

Make the jelly

  1. For the jelly, combine grated apple, lemon juice, lemon rind, sugar, and egg in a bowl.

  2. Cook the jelly mixture over hot water until thickened, then let it cool.

Assemble

  1. Layer the cake with jelly in between the layers.

  2. Dust the top with sugar.

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 + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender crumb.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the cake set as it bakes.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together.
Baking powder
Releases gas that makes the cake rise and become light.
Tart apple
Adds moisture and acidity, giving the jelly its tangy flavour and body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the apple flavour and helps the jelly thicken.

The step that matters

Cooking the jelly over hot water until thickened. Heating the egg and apple mixture gently lets the egg thicken without scrambling. Overheating can curdle the egg, and the jelly must cool enough to spread without soaking into the cake.

Swap the apple

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

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

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