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Dessert

Lemon Jelly Cake

A cake with layers of lemon jelly made from lemon pulp, peel, sugar, butter, and eggs.

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 ↓

Lemon Jelly 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. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the milk and mix well.

  4. Gradually add the flour and baking powder, mixing until smooth.

  5. Beat in the eggs one at a time until fully incorporated.

  6. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans and bake until golden brown.

Make the lemon jelly and assemble

  1. For the jelly, combine the lemon pulp and peel with ⅓ cup sugar, butter, and 2 eggs in a saucepan.

  2. Mix well and boil until the mixture is clear.

  3. Spread the lemon jelly between the layers of 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Milk + coffeetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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 set the jelly, giving structure to the cake and body to the filling.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the creamed mixture trap air for a tender crumb.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender texture and golden browning.
Lemons
Provide acidity and aroma to the lemon jelly filling.

The step that matters

Boiling the lemon jelly until clear. The eggs in the jelly can scramble if the mixture boils too hard or too long, and the filling thickens as it cooks, so heat must be managed to keep it smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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