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Dessert

Lemon Jelly Cake

A lemon-flavored cake topped with a lemon jelly layer.

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 ↓

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. In a bowl, cream together 1 cup sugar, 1 egg, and 1 egg-sized piece of butter until smooth.

  3. Add 1 cup milk and 3 cups flour, mixing until well combined.

  4. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake until golden.

Make the jelly

  1. For the jelly, combine the juice and zest of 1 lemon, 1 egg, 1 cup sugar, 3 teaspoons corn starch, and 1 cup hot water in a saucepan.

  2. Mix well and bring to a boil, stirring constantly until thickened.

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 + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + corntop 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

Flour
Provides the main structure that sets the cake crumb as it bakes.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, binding the batter and helping it set.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and the jelly and helps the jelly thicken with starch.
Corn starch
Thickens the lemon mixture into a jelly as it heats with the liquid.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour in the cake batter.
Lemon juice and zest
Provides acidity and aroma that flavour the jelly.

The step that matters

Stirring the jelly until thickened. Corn starch thickens only when heated to a boil while being stirred. Stopping early leaves the jelly runny, and stirring stops lumps from forming on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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