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Dessert

Cream Cakes

A baked cake made from a mixture of water, butter, flour, eggs, and baking soda, served with a lemon-flavored filling of milk, eggs, sugar, and flour.

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 Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the choux dough

  1. Combine water and butter in a pot and bring to a boil.

  2. Stir in the flour while boiling.

  3. Remove the pot from heat to cool.

  4. Add the eggs one at a time, stirring thoroughly without beating.

  5. Dissolve the baking soda in an equal amount of water.

  6. Add the dissolved baking soda to the mixture.

  7. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto a baking pan, shaping them like cream cakes.

Bake and make the filling

  1. Bake in a very hot oven (400°F / 200°C) for 15 minutes.

  2. Boil the milk for the filling.

  3. Beat together the eggs, sugar, and flour in a bowl.

  4. Stir in the boiling milk until thickened.

  5. Flavor the filling with lemon.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 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
Add structure and richness, setting the dough and custard as they cook.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the dough.
Flour
Provides structure by setting with the eggs and liquid as it cooks.
Baking soda
Releases gas that helps the dough rise and puff.
Milk
Forms the thickened custard filling with eggs, sugar and flour.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it thicken smoothly.

The step that matters

Add the eggs one at a time without beating. Eggs must be fully absorbed into the hot paste one at a time, stirred gently, so the dough becomes smooth and glossy. Beating adds too much air and can make the dough collapse, while adding them too fast can leave it lumpy and unable to hold its shape while baking.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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