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Dessert

Cheap Cream Cake

A simple cake with a sweet cream filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Cheap Cream 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, mix 1 cup sugar, 1 egg, 1 cup sweet milk, 2 cups all-purpose flour, 1 tablespoon butter, and 2 heaping teaspoons baking powder.

  3. Divide the batter into three parts and pour into round shallow pans.

  4. Bake until golden brown.

Make the cream

  1. For the cream, heat 1 egg and ½ cup sugar together.

  2. Add ¼ cup flour, wet with a little milk, and stir into ½ pint boiling milk until thick.

  3. Flavor to taste and let cool.

Assemble

  1. Spread the cream between the baked cake layers.

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. Butter + creamtop 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
Bind the batter and, when cooked into the cream, thicken it into a custard.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and structure that set the cake crumb and thicken the cream.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and cream and helps the cake brown.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and richness to the batter and the cooked cream.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor in the cake.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the boiling milk. Flour must be wet with a little milk first and stirred into boiling milk so it disperses without lumps. Starch then gelatinises as it heats, thickening the cream; stopping too early leaves it thin.

“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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