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Dessert

Layer Cream Cake

A cake made with a batter of eggs, flour, sugar, and leavening, topped with a lemon‑flavored cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Layer Cream Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the cake

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix the eggs, flour, sugar, cream of tartar, water, and baking soda until well combined.

  3. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake for 20 minutes.

  4. Once baked, let the cake cool and then cut it in half.

Make the cream and assemble

  1. For the cream, beat together 2 eggs, 1 cup of sugar, and ½ cup of corn-starch.

  2. Pour the mixture into 1 pint of boiling milk and stir until thickened.

  3. Flavor the cream with the grated rind and juice of a lemon or lemon extract.

  4. Spread the cream between the layers of the cooled cake.

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

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

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Provide structure to the batter and richness to the cream.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake crumb.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter, helping stabilize the foam and tenderize the crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that lifts the cake.
Corn-starch
Thickens the milk into a set, spreadable cream.

The step that matters

Stirring the cornstarch mixture into boiling milk. Cornstarch thickens only when heated, and it can clump if poured in too fast or stirred too little. Keep stirring while the cream thickens so it becomes smooth rather than lumpy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, sugar, cream, corn, 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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