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Dessert

Bakers’ Cream Cakes

A cake made from a butter and flour batter, baked and filled with a thickened custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Bakers’ Cream Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the choux dough

  1. Boil the water and butter together.

  2. Pour the mixture into the flour and let it cool slightly.

  3. Stir in the beaten eggs until well combined.

  4. Drop spoonfuls of the batter onto buttered baking sheets.

  5. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until golden.

Make the custard

  1. For the custard, boil the milk.

  2. In a bowl, mix the beaten egg, sugar, flour, and cornstarch.

  3. Add the egg mixture to the boiling milk, stirring constantly until thickened.

Fill and serve

  1. Let the custard cool, then fill the baked cakes.

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. 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and provide structure as they set during baking, and thicken the custard.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that keeps the cakes tender.
All-purpose flour
Provides starch that gives the batter and custard their structure.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, which thickens as it heats.
Cornstarch
Thickens the custard so it holds its shape when filled.

The step that matters

Add the egg mixture to the boiling milk. Eggs can scramble if they meet very hot milk too abruptly. Adding them while stirring constantly keeps the mixture smooth as the starch and egg proteins thicken it evenly.

“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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