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Dessert

Delicious Lemon Jelly Cake

A layered lemon cake with a lemon jelly filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Delicious 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 batter

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

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

  3. Add the milk and eggs, mixing well.

  4. In a separate bowl, combine the cream of tartar, baking soda, and flour.

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

  6. Divide the batter into five layers and bake until golden.

Make the lemon jelly

  1. For the jelly, grate the lemon rind and combine it with the lemon juice, sugar, egg, water, butter, and flour in a saucepan.

  2. Mix with a little water and boil until thickened.

Assemble and rest

  1. Once the cake layers are cool, spread the lemon jelly between them.

  2. For best flavor, let the cake sit for a week or ten days 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 + 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. Sugar + creamtop 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. Milk + flourtop 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the layers set in the oven.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter so baking soda reacts and helps the layers rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that lightens the layers.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake layers together.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the cake layers.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright flavor to the jelly filling.

The step that matters

Boil the lemon jelly until thickened. The egg and flour thicken the filling as they cook, and under-boiling leaves it runny while over-cooking can make it stiff or grainy. Stirring keeps the egg from scrambling.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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