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Dessert

Lemon Jelly Cake

A baked cake topped with a lemon-flavored jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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 ↓

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.

Make the cake

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

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  4. Sift together the corn starch, flour, cream of tartar, and baking soda.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture, mixing until smooth.

  6. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake for 25-30 minutes.

Make the lemon jelly and serve

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

  2. Beat the mixture together and cook over medium heat for 2-3 minutes until slightly thickened.

  3. Spread the lemon jelly over the cooled cake before serving.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air, giving the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, binding the batter as the cake sets in the oven.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a light, fluffy creamed base.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that helps the cake rise.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that works with the baking soda to lift and lighten the cake.

The step that matters

Cooking the lemon jelly. The jelly contains egg and must be cooked gently over medium heat while stirring. Overheating can scramble the egg, while undercooking leaves it runny and unable to thicken properly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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