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Dessert

Cream Cakes

A cake made with a butter and flour base, baked and filled with a sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Cream Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the choux paste

  1. Boil the water and butter together.

  2. Stir in the flour while boiling and let it cool.

  3. Add the beaten eggs and drop the mixture onto tins.

Bake and make the cream

  1. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 10-15 minutes.

  2. For the filling, beat 4 eggs, sugar, and 1 cup of flour. Stir this into the boiling milk and let it boil for a few minutes.

  3. Cool and flavor with lemon or vanilla.

  4. When the cakes are done, make an opening and fill with the cream.

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. Flour + sugartop 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
Bind the paste and set the filling, giving structure as they cook.
Flour
Thickens the boiling water and butter and gives the paste its body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, tenderising the paste and adding flavour.
Milk
Forms the base of the cream filling, which thickens as it boils.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream filling.

The step that matters

Cooling before adding the eggs. Eggs added to paste that is still hot can scramble instead of blending smoothly. Letting the flour mixture cool first keeps the eggs incorporated, so the paste rises and holds its shape.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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