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Dessert

Caramel Cake

A sweet cake with caramel filling made from sugar, butter, milk, eggs, flour, baking powder, and chocolate.

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 ↓

Caramel 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.

  3. Add the sweet milk and eggs, mixing well.

  4. Gradually stir in the flour and baking powder.

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

Make the caramel filling

  1. For the caramel, combine sugar, sweet milk, egg yolk, and grated chocolate in a saucepan.

  2. Stir over heat until thickened, then let cool before spreading between the cake layers.

Finish

  1. Ice the top with vanilla-flavored icing.

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. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness to the crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor in the cake.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake as it sets in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises.
Egg yolk
Thickens the caramel filling as it cooks.

The step that matters

Stir the caramel over heat until thickened. Egg yolk thickens when heated but can scramble if the heat is too high or stirring stops. Stirring gently over moderate heat keeps the filling smooth and lets it set properly as it cools.

“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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