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Dessert

Cream Cakes

Cream Cakes are small baked cakes filled with a milk‑flour cream.

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 batter

  1. Bring the boiling water to a simmer in a pan and add the butter until melted.

  2. Stir in the flour and let the mixture boil for one minute, stirring constantly.

  3. Cool the mixture while stirring occasionally.

  4. Once cool, add the beaten eggs and baking soda.

  5. Drop spoonfuls of the batter onto a buttered baking sheet, spaced apart.

  6. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for about 15 minutes; do not remove until fully baked to prevent collapsing.

Make the cream

  1. For the cream, mix a portion of the milk with the flour until smooth.

  2. Beat the eggs and combine with sugar and the remaining milk.

  3. Heat the mixture, stirring occasionally, until it boils.

  4. Quickly stir in the flour mixture until thickened.

  5. Remove from heat and add lemon extract.

Assemble and serve

  1. Once cooled, cut the cakes and fill them 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

Butter
Melts into the boiling water to add fat and richness to the batter.
Flour
Starch that thickens the cooked batter and sets the structure of the cakes and cream.
Eggs
Add structure and richness to the batter and help thicken the cream as they set.
Baking soda
Helps the batter rise and lighten during baking.
Milk
Provides liquid that thickens with flour and eggs to form the cream filling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the cream filling.

The step that matters

Bake until fully set. Removing the cakes before they are fully baked can make them collapse, because the starch and egg structure need time in the oven to firm up and hold their shape as they cool.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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