Skip to main content
Dessert

Cream Cakes

Cream cakes are baked batter filled with custard.

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 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the choux pastry

  1. In a pot, pour boiling water over the butter and heat until it melts.

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

  3. Let the mixture cool, then add the 9 beaten eggs and mix well.

  4. Bake the mixture in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

Make the custard and fill

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

  2. Sweeten and flavor the custard to your taste, then heat until it thickens.

  3. Once the cakes are baked, open the sides and fill them with the 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
Provides the structure that holds the puffed cakes and thickens the custard.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and melts into the boiling water to start the dough.
Eggs
Set during baking to give the cakes their structure and add richness.
Rich cream
Gives the custard its body, richness and smooth texture.

The step that matters

Bake until golden. Baking long enough sets the egg-rich dough so the cakes hold their shape and stay hollow for filling; underbaked cakes may collapse or turn soggy once filled.

“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