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Dessert

Delicious Layer Cake

A cake made with egg yolks, sugar, lemon, flour, and cream filling, baked in layers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Delicious Layer Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the yolks of the eggs with the sugar until very light.

  2. Add the lemon juice and rind, and a pinch of salt.

  3. Beat the egg whites until very stiff and fold them into the mixture.

  4. Gently fold in the sifted flour.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake in layer tins until golden brown.

  2. Once cooled, layer the cakes with cream filling.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Egg yolks
Enrich the batter with fat and emulsifiers, giving a rich, tender crumb.
Egg whites
Whipped to a stiff foam, they trap air that lifts the cake as it bakes.
Fine granulated sugar
Sweetens the cake and, beaten with the yolks, helps create a light, airy batter.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake's crumb as the batter bakes.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whipped whites hold air, which lifts the cake. Folding gently keeps that air in; stirring or beating deflates the batter and produces a dense, flat layer.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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