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Dessert

Lemon Cake

A lemon cake with a lemon filling made from sugar, lemon juice, rind, hot water, butter, cornstarch, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Lemon Cake

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 ↓

Lemon 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 cake

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

  2. Cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the milk and eggs, mixing well.

  4. Sift the baking powder with the flour and gradually add to the mixture.

  5. Pour the batter into jelly tins and bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, combine 1 cup sugar, lemon juice, lemon rind, and hot water in a double boiler.

  2. Add the heaping teaspoon of butter and the dissolved cornstarch or flour.

  3. Stir until the mixture thickens, then add the yolks of 2 eggs.

Assemble

  1. Spread the filling between the layers of 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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 enrich the filling, adding structure and richness when set.
Butter
Adds tenderness and richness to the cake crumb and gives the filling body.
Flour
Provides the structure of the cake and thickens the filling with cornstarch or flour.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and filling and helps browning in the baked layers.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Milk
Adds moisture to the batter and helps form a tender crumb.

The step that matters

Stir the filling until it thickens. Starch must be heated while stirring so its granules swell and gelatinize; stopping too early leaves a runny filling, and adding the egg yolks too hot can scramble them.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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