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Dessert

Cream Cake

A baked cake with a butter‑milk icing thickened with sugar and flavored with peanut butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Cream 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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the cake

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

  2. In a bowl, beat the eggs and sugar until well combined.

  3. Add the sour cream and mix thoroughly.

  4. In another bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and baking soda.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, stirring until smooth.

  6. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake for 25-30 minutes.

Make the icing

  1. For the icing, melt the butter and mix with milk or sour cream.

  2. Thicken the icing with pulverized sugar and stir in the peanut butter until smooth.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + peanuttop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,048 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Flour and butter 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
Beaten with sugar to add structure and help bind the batter.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and tenderness and a slight acidity to the batter.
Flour
Provides the main structure of the cake as it sets in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the heat, helping the cake rise and become light.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour cream to help the cake rise and brown.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and contributes to a tender crumb and browning.

The step that matters

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, stirring until smooth.. Adding dry ingredients gradually and stopping once smooth prevents lumps and limits gluten development, which keeps the cake tender rather than tough.

Swap the peanut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peanutthe original

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