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Dessert

Custard for Tipsy Cake

A custard made from arrowroot and milk, boiled and cooled, poured over a tipsy cake.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and milk work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 817 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyraldehyde, which smells malty, chocolate. The science ↓

Custard for Tipsy Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Mix the arrowroot and cold milk together in a bowl until smooth.

  2. Pour the mixture gradually into boiling milk.

  3. Boil for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly.

  4. Remove the saucepan from the heat and stir the custard until it cools.

Serve

  1. Once cool, pour the custard over the cake.

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. Arrowroot + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk into a smooth custard as it heats and gelatinises.
Cold milk
Dissolves the arrowroot evenly so it can thicken the hot milk without lumps.

The step that matters

Pouring the arrowroot mixture into boiling milk. Adding it gradually while the milk is boiling helps the starch disperse evenly. Poured in a rush or into cool liquid, it clumps and the custard turns lumpy.

“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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