Skip to main content
Dessert

Lemon Cream Cake

A moist cake flavored with lemon, layered with a lemon‑sugar filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 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 batter

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

  2. Cream together the butter and sugar.

  3. Add the sweet milk and mix well.

  4. In a separate bowl combine the flour and baking powder.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture.

  6. Fold in the beaten egg yolks.

  7. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the batter.

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

Make the lemon filling

  1. Combine 1 cup sugar, 2 teaspoons butter, 2 eggs, grated rind and juice of 2 lemons in a saucepan.

  2. Cook over medium heat until it thickens to a jelly‑like consistency.

Assemble and serve

  1. Spread the filling between the cake layers and dust powdered sugar on top.

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. Milk + flourtop 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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 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

Eggs
Yolks enrich the batter and whites, beaten stiff, lighten it and help the cake rise and hold its structure.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and adds richness and a tender crumb to the cake.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure once mixed with the liquid and set by heat.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise and become light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps brown it, and in the filling it thickens with the lemon juice.
Lemons
Juice adds acidity and bright flavour, and the rind adds aroma to the filling.

The step that matters

Cooking the lemon filling over medium heat. The filling thickens as egg proteins set and sugar and juice combine. Heat that is too high can scramble the eggs, while too little heat leaves it runny.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes