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Dessert

Cream Cake

A layered cake with butter, sugar, milk, flour, baking powder, eggs, and a sweetened cornstarch filling.

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 ↓

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. Cream together the butter and sugar until smooth.

  2. Gradually add the milk and sifted flour mixed with baking powder.

  3. Incorporate the egg yolks, then fold in the egg whites last.

  4. Bake in layers at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, mix cornstarch with enough cold milk to form a paste.

  2. Boil the milk with sugar and a pinch of salt.

  3. Beat the egg yolks and add the cornstarch mixture.

  4. Once the milk boils, gradually pour it into the egg mixture, stirring constantly until thick.

  5. Stir in the sweet butter and let cool.

Assemble

  1. Spread the filling between the cake layers.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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
Creamed with sugar to trap air, giving the cake a tender, fine crumb.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake layers together as they bake.
Egg yolks
Add richness and emulsify the batter, and thicken the filling when heated.
Egg whites
Folded in last to add lift and a lighter texture to the cake.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Cornstarch
Thickens the cooked milk filling into a smooth, spreadable cream.

The step that matters

Stirring the filling while it thickens. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble if the hot milk is added too fast or the mixture is not stirred constantly. Constant stirring keeps the eggs smooth while the cornstarch gelatinizes and thickens the cream.

“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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