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Dessert

Maple Cream Cake

A cake made with sugar, butter, flour, eggs, baking powder, milk, and maple syrup, topped with a maple cream filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Maple 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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the cake

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter.

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

  4. Sift together the flour and baking powder, then add to the mixture alternately with the milk.

  5. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan.

  6. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Make the filling and assemble

  1. For the filling, boil the maple syrup until it can be beaten into a cream.

  2. Spread the filling between the layers of the cake.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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 the sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender crumb and rich flavour.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, binding the batter as they set in the oven.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Maple syrup
Provides the sweet maple flavour and, once boiled, becomes the thick filling.

The step that matters

Boiling the maple syrup for the filling. Syrup must be cooked to the right concentration before it can be beaten into a cream. Too little cooking leaves it runny, while overcooking turns it hard and grainy as sugar crystallises.

“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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