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Dessert

Puff Cake

A cake made from a batter of sugar, flour, eggs, water, baking powder, and salt, baked and filled with custard paste and iced with chocolate.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Puff 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 batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix sugar, flour, eggs, cold water, baking powder, and salt until smooth.

  3. Pour the batter into sponge cake pans and bake until golden.

Make the custard paste

  1. For the paste, combine milk, corn starch, egg, and a pinch of salt in a saucepan.

  2. Cook over medium heat, stirring until it thickens like boiled custard.

Assemble and ice

  1. Once the cakes are baked, split each cake open with a knife.

  2. Fill the space with the custard paste, ensuring it doesn't spill out.

  3. Ice the cakes with chocolate dressing for extra flavor.

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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 add structure as they set during baking.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake crumb as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and turns light.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk mixture so the paste sets like custard.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard paste and adds richness.

The step that matters

Cook the custard paste until thickened. Cornstarch thickens only when heated to a simmer while stirred; undercooked paste stays runny and will spill out of the split cakes, while overcooking can scorch the milk on the pan bottom.

“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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