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Dessert

Impromptu Jelly Cake

A cake with a baked apple and lemon jelly layer.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Impromptu 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 butter and 2 cups of sugar.

  3. Add the yolks of the eggs.

  4. Mix the batter well.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites and flour until combined.

Make the jelly

  1. Combine the grated apple, lemon rind, lemon juice, 1 cup of sugar, and 1 egg in a saucepan.

  2. Boil the mixture until it thickens, stirring constantly.

  3. Cool the jelly before using.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake the cake in jelly cake pans or in thin layers.

  2. Spread the jelly between each layer as you assemble 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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  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 sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Yolks enrich the batter, and beaten whites add structure and lift to the layers.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake layers together once baked.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a fine, tender texture when creamed with butter.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma to the jelly filling, and the cooked jelly thickens as it boils.

The step that matters

Boil the jelly until it thickens. The jelly sets by thickening as it cooks, and stirring constantly keeps the egg and sugar from scorching or curdling on the base of the pan.

Swap the apple

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

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

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