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Dessert

Cream Cakes

A layered cake with sweet milk and lemon-flavored filling, baked with eggs, flour, sugar, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 20 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cream Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cake

  1. Beat together sugar and eggs.

  2. Add baking soda dissolved in sweet milk, flour, and cream of tartar.

  3. Bake the batter in 4 tins.

  4. Bake in a moderate oven.

Make the filling

  1. Beat together white sugar, egg whites, and flour for the filling.

  2. Thin the filling with sweet milk.

  3. Stir in boiling milk.

  4. Let the filling boil for a few minutes.

  5. Flavor the filling with lemon.

  6. Spread the filling between the 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Eggs
Provide structure and richness to the batter as they set when baked.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter and helps stabilise the egg whites for a lighter crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that lifts the cake.
Flour
Forms the gluten and starch network that gives the cakes and filling their body.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and filling and helps keep the crumb tender.

The step that matters

Let the filling boil for a few minutes. The flour in the filling must be fully boiled to cook out its raw starch taste and to thicken the filling enough to hold between the layers.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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