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Dessert

French Cream Cake

A cake made with eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, cold water, sweet milk, and a cream filling of egg, sugar, corn starch, butter, and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

French Cream Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the cake

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

  2. Beat eggs and sugar until light.

  3. Add flour and baking powder, then mix in cold water.

  4. Pour batter into greased cake pan and bake until golden.

Make the cream

  1. While the cake is baking, prepare the cream.

  2. Boil the sweet milk.

  3. Beat egg with sugar and corn starch in another bowl.

  4. Stir egg mixture into milk when nearly boiling.

  5. Add butter and flavor to taste.

Assemble

  1. Split warm cake and spread cream between layers.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  4. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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
Beaten with sugar to trap air, giving the cake its light structure.
Flour
Forms the cake's main structure once set by heat.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise.
Sweet milk
Forms the base of the cream, which thickens when heated with egg.
Corn starch
Thickens the cream as it heats with the milk and egg.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it stay tender and light.

The step that matters

Stir egg mixture into milk when nearly boiling. Adding the egg mixture to hot milk gradually and stirring constantly keeps the egg from scrambling, while the starch thickens the cream smoothly.

“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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