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Dessert

Holiday Cake

A cake made with sugar, butter, corn starch, flour, baking soda, sweet milk, egg whites, flavored with an essence, topped with a sugar‑egg white frosting.

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 ↓

Holiday 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 batter

  1. Beat the sugar and butter together until creamy.

  2. Mix in the corn starch, flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and sweet milk.

  3. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the mixture along with your chosen essence.

  4. Pour the batter into two 12‑inch by 8‑inch pans lined with tin.

Bake and frost

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until a toothpick comes out clean.

  2. For the frosting, beat the fine sugar and egg whites with the same essence until smooth.

  3. Layer the cakes with frosting in between and on top.

  4. Once cooled, trim the edges and cut into 4‑inch by 3‑inch pieces.

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

Egg whites
Whipped to stiff foam, they give the cake lift and an airy, light structure.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air, adding tenderness and richness to the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps create a tender texture.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter, stabilizing the whipped egg whites and helping the crumb stay fine.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic cream of tartar to release gas, helping the cake rise.

The step that matters

Folding the stiff egg whites into the batter. Whites hold air only while whipped; overmixing or deflating them during folding loses lift, leaving a dense cake. Fold gently, just until no white streaks remain.

“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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