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Dessert

Cream Cakes

A cake made with butter, flour, eggs, and a boiled milk filling, optionally glazed with chocolate or preserves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the choux paste

  1. In a pot, bring 1 pint of water to a boil.

  2. Quickly stir in 1 cup of butter until melted.

  3. Add 2 cups of flour and remove from heat to cool.

  4. Once cooled, mix in 5 beaten eggs.

  5. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto baking tins, spacing them 2 inches apart.

  6. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, heat ½ pint of boiled milk.

  2. In a bowl, mix 2 tablespoons of flour with a little cold milk and 1 egg.

  3. Stir this mixture into the hot milk and cook until thickened.

  4. Flavor with lemon or vanilla.

Assemble and finish

  1. Once the cakes are baked, cut them open and fill with the mixture.

  2. Optionally, glaze with chocolate and fill with preserves.

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 + strawberrytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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
Melts into the boiling water to add fat and richness to the dough.
All-purpose flour
Starches set during baking to give the cakes their structure.
Eggs
Bind the dough and expand with steam to give the cakes their hollow shell.
Milk
Liquid that the flour thickens into a smooth, creamy filling.

The step that matters

Cooking the cake dough before baking. Stirring in the flour and heating it briefly before adding eggs gives the paste enough structure to puff. If the paste is too hot when eggs go in, they can scramble, and if it is too cool or too wet, the cakes may not rise.

Swap the strawberry

The recipe marks strawberry as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, egg, milk, sugar, lemon, chocolate):

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

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