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Dessert

Cream Cakes

A simple cake made with butter, boiling water, flour, and eggs, baked into small cakes and filled with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cream Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

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

Make the choux paste

  1. Combine butter and boiling water in a saucepan.

  2. Once boiling, add flour all at once and stir vigorously.

  3. Remove from heat when the mixture leaves the sides of the saucepan.

  4. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.

Shape and bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls onto a buttered baking sheet, spacing them 1.5 inches apart.

  2. Shape the mixture into circles, slightly piled in the center.

  3. Bake for 25 minutes at 400°F (200°C).

Cool and fill

  1. Cool the cakes.

  2. Split the cakes.

  3. Fill with cream filling or sweetened whipped cream.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Butter
Melts into the boiling water to add fat and richness to the dough.
Flour
Its starch gelatinizes with the hot liquid to form the paste that holds the cakes' structure.
Eggs
Add moisture and structure, and help the cakes puff and set as they bake.

The step that matters

Beating in the eggs. Eggs must be added one at a time and fully mixed in, so the paste becomes smooth and glossy and can hold its shape. Adding them too quickly can make the paste loose and stop the cakes from rising properly.

“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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