Skip to main content
Dessert

Cream Cakes

A baked cake made with flour, butter, boiling water, eggs, and topped with a custard of cream, eggs, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cream Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the choux dough

  1. Pour boiling water over the butter in a pot and place it over the heat.

  2. Once it begins to boil, stir in the flour.

  3. Allow the mixture to cool.

  4. Add the 9 beaten eggs and mix well.

  5. Bake in a moderate oven (350°F / 175°C) until golden.

Make the custard

  1. For the custard, combine the rich cream, 3 beaten eggs, and a little flour in a saucepan.

  2. Sweeten and flavor to taste.

  3. Bring the custard to a boil.

Fill and serve

  1. Open the crusts at the sides.

  2. Fill the crusts with custard.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Forms the starch structure that holds the dough and custard together.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the dough and helps it stay tender.
Eggs
Bind the dough and custard, giving structure and helping the crusts rise and set.
Rich cream
Provides fat and moisture, giving the custard a smooth, rich texture.

The step that matters

Bring the custard to a boil. Eggs in the custard can curdle or scramble if overheated, so it should be heated gently while stirring. Once thickened, the flour and egg proteins set it into a smooth filling.

“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.

More cream cakes recipes

Boston 4Cream for 3Hartford 3 See all 94 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes