Skip to main content
Dessert

White Mountain Cake

A sweet cake made with flour, sugar, butter, milk, eggs, baking soda, cream of tartar, lemon, and iced with a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

White Mountain 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 large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the flour, sweet milk, lemon juice, and grated lemon rind, mixing well.

  4. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  5. In another bowl, combine the baking soda and cream of tartar, then add to the batter.

  6. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

  7. Pour the batter into jelly cake pans and bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

Make the icing and assemble

  1. For the icing, boil the water and sugar until thick.

  2. Pour the hot syrup over the beaten egg whites and beat until cool.

  3. Layer the cake with icing and dredge with flour before icing.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Unsalted butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and gives the cake a tender, rich texture.
Eggs
Whites are whipped to add lift and light texture, while the yolks add richness and structure.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and, creamed with butter, helps create a light, fine crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that makes the cake rise.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter and stabilizes whipped egg whites, helping them hold their volume.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the beaten egg whites. Whipped egg whites trap air that gives the cake its lift. Stirring or mixing vigorously knocks that air out, so the cake bakes up denser and flatter. Fold slowly with a spatula until just combined.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More white mountain cake recipes

Philadelphia 3 See all 115 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes