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Dessert

Macaroon Cake

A layered cake with a custard filling made from butter, flour, sugar, eggs, milk, and baking leavening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Macaroon 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 batter

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

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  3. Add the egg yolks to the mixture.

  4. Sift the cream of tartar and baking soda into the flour, then add to the mixture.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

Bake and make the custard

  1. Divide the batter into two layers and bake until golden.

  2. For the custard filling, beat 1 egg with ½ cup milk.

  3. Stir in 1 tablespoon flour and ½ cup sugar, then add to the milk.

  4. Cook in a double boiler until thick, stirring constantly.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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 give the cake a tender, rich texture.
Eggs
Yolks enrich the batter and whites, beaten and folded in, add lightness and structure.
Cream of tartar
Acidic ingredient that stabilises the beaten egg whites and helps the cake rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas, helping the cake rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown and keep moisture.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Beaten whites hold air that gives the cake its lift. Stirring vigorously deflates them, so the batter should be folded with a light, sweeping motion until just combined.

“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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