Skip to main content
Dessert

Gold Medal French Cream Cake

A layered cake with a sweet cream filling flavored with lemon or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Gold Medal French 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. Beat the eggs.

  3. Mix in the sugar, flour, baking powder, thick sweet cream, and lemon extract or vanilla.

  4. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan.

  5. Bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

Make the cream filling

  1. Stir the flour into a little cold milk to make the mock cream.

  2. Add the beaten egg and sugar to the mock cream.

  3. Mix in the butter and sweet milk.

  4. Boil the mixture until it thickens.

  5. Flavor the thickened mixture with lemon.

Assemble

  1. Spread the warm cream between the layers of 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 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. Flour + milktop 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 add structure and richness to the cake crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake and thickens the cream filling.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and turns light.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown and keep moisture.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the cream filling a smooth, rich texture.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until it thickens. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated enough to swell and set. Stopping too early leaves the filling runny, while overcooking can make it stiff or cause it to stick and scorch on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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