Skip to main content
Dessert

Cheese-Cakes, Lemon or Orange

A baked cheese cake flavored with lemon rind, juice, and optional orange, topped with candied peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Cheese-Cakes, Lemon or Orange

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.

Prepare the filling

  1. Grate the rind of the lemons and squeeze their juice over the sponge biscuits soaked in cream.

  2. Add butter, sugar, and beaten eggs. Season with cinnamon and nutmeg. Mix all ingredients thoroughly.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line small pans with puff pastry and pour in the mixture.

  2. Top with thin slices of candied lemon-peel.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until set.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Biscuit + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together368 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Biscuit + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together312 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set when baked.
Sponge biscuits
Soak up cream to form the soft body of the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender texture to the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the sharp lemon juice.
Lemons
Provide acidity and aroma from the juice and grated rind.

The step that matters

Bake at 350°F (175°C) until set. Eggs thicken as their proteins set with heat. Underbaking leaves the filling runny, while overbaking can make it curdle or dry out.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (biscuit, cream, butter, sugar, egg, cinnamon, nutmeg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, cream, butter, sugar, egg, cinnamon, nutmeg. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesBaking Powder BiscuitBaking Powder Biscuit119 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes