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Dessert

Snow, or Silver-cake

A light, sugar-based cake made with butter, flour, egg whites, lemon juice, and rose-water, baked in small tins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Snow, or Silver-cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a mixing bowl.

  2. Beat in 1 cup of sugar until the mixture is very white and light.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff, then gradually add the remaining cup of sugar while continuing to beat.

  4. Combine the butter and sugar mixture with the flour mixture.

  5. Gently fold in the egg whites and sugar mixture until evenly combined.

  6. Add the rose-water during the final mixing.

Bake and ice

  1. Pour the batter into small square tins or sheet pans and bake as usual.

  2. Ice the cake with icing flavored with rose-water.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lemon + rosetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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 into a stiff foam that lightens the batter and gives the cake its airy, snowy crumb.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and add richness and a tender texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the light foam and creamed mixture together as the cake sets.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, beaten into the whites, helps stabilise the foam.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the egg whites and sugar mixture. Stiff whites hold air that gives the cake its lightness. Vigorous stirring knocks that air out, so the batter should be folded gently until just combined.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Figfits about as well

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