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Dessert

Lemon Filled Cake

A layered lemon cake with a lemon filling made from sugar, flour, egg, butter, lemon rind, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Lemon Filled 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 batter

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

  2. Cream the butter, then gradually add the sugar.

  3. Beat in the egg yolks and milk until well combined.

  4. Sift together the baking powder and flour, then add the sifted mixture to the batter.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites until stiff.

Bake and make the filling

  1. Bake in layers until golden.

  2. For the lemon filling, mix the sugar, flour, egg, butter, lemon rind, and lemon juice in the order given.

  3. Cook the filling over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it reaches boiling point.

Assemble

  1. Assemble the cake layers with the lemon filling in between.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and add richness and tender texture to the crumb.
Eggs
Egg yolks bind and enrich the batter, while whipped whites add lift and structure.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake and sets as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to make the cake rise and become light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps hold air when creamed with the butter.
Lemon juice
Adds bright acidity that balances the sweetness of the filling.

The step that matters

Cooking the lemon filling. Stirring constantly over medium heat keeps the egg from scrambling on the bottom of the pan. Bringing it to a boil fully cooks the egg and flour, which thickens the filling.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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