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Dessert

White Pineapple Cake

A sweet cake made with butter, sugar, milk, flour, baking powder, pineapple, and boiled icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

White Pineapple Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the milk and mix well.

  3. Sift together the flour and baking powder, then gradually add to the mixture.

Bake and assemble

  1. Divide the batter into six layers and pour into cake pans.

  2. Bake until golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean.

  3. Layer the cake with fresh or grated pineapple between each layer.

  4. Top with boiled 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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + pineappletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together885 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  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

Sugar
Adds sweetness and, creamed with butter, helps trap air for a light crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender texture and rich flavor.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure as its proteins set in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas that makes the batter rise.
Milk
Adds moisture and hydrates the flour to form the batter.

The step that matters

Bake until golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean. Baking too long dries out the cake crumb, while underbaking leaves the center wet and dense. The toothpick test checks that the structure has set throughout.

Swap the pineapple

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

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

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