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Dessert

Small Lemon Queen Cakes

A small lemon cake made with butter, sugar, flour, eggs, lemon zest, baking soda, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Small Lemon Queen Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the lemon rind and beaten egg yolks.

  3. Sift the flour with the baking soda and add to the mixture along with the lemon juice.

  4. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake in tiny gem tins until golden, about 15‑20 minutes.

  2. Garnish each cake with boiled frosting and a candied cherry.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and give the cakes a tender, rich crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cakes and helps cream the butter into a light base.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and structure, while whipped whites add air for lift.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that helps the cakes rise.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavor, and reacts with the baking soda.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Whipped whites hold air that leavens the batter. Stirring vigorously or overmixing deflates them, which leaves the cakes dense and flat.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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