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Dessert

Lemon Honey Cake

A moist cake flavored with lemon and honey, layered with a honey‑lemon glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Lemon Honey 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. Cream together the butter and sugar, then add the milk and mix well.

  3. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold them into the mixture.

  4. Combine the corn starch, flour, and baking powder, then add to the mixture.

  5. Pour the batter into jelly tins and bake until golden.

Make the lemon honey

  1. For the Lemon Honey, melt the sugar, lemon juice, and butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Once dissolved, stir in the beaten eggs and cook until thickened like honey.

Assemble and store

  1. Spread the Lemon Honey between the layers of cake and store any leftovers in a covered container.

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. Milk + honeytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  3. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 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
Adds richness and tenderness to the crumb and carries flavour through the cake.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they lighten the batter and give the cake its rise and structure.
Egg yolks
Enrich the batter and, cooked with lemon juice, thicken the lemon honey.
Flour
Provides the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Corn starch
Softens the crumb by diluting flour gluten, giving a finer, more tender texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavour and, with eggs, thickens the lemon honey.

The step that matters

Cooking the lemon honey. Eggs thicken as their proteins set with heat. Cooking over too high a heat or for too long can scramble them, leaving a grainy curd instead of a smooth, honey-like filling.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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