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Dessert

Variegated Cakes

A cake made in three colors using spinach juice, cochineal, and bitter almond flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 352 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Variegated Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and powdered sugar together.

  2. Add the milk, bitter almond flavoring, whipped egg whites, and flour to the mixture.

  3. Divide the batter into three parts.

Color the batter

  1. Bruise a few spinach leaves in a thin muslin bag to extract the juice.

  2. Add a few drops of spinach juice to one portion of the batter.

  3. Color another portion of the batter with cochineal.

  4. Leave the third portion of the batter white.

  5. If available, pound pistachio nuts for the green batter for added flavor.

Assemble and finish

  1. Spoon a little of each colored batter into small, round pans or cups, stirring lightly as you add each color.

  2. Layer the white batter between the pink and green to enhance the colors.

  3. Ice the sides and top of the cakes.

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. Almond + spinachtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together352 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Flour + spinachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creaming with sugar traps air, giving the cakes a tender, light crumb.
Egg whites
Whipped whites add air and lift, helping the cakes rise and become light.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets as the cakes bake and holds their shape.
Milk
Adds moisture to the batter and helps it blend into a smooth, pourable mix.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and dissolves smoothly into the creamed butter for a fine texture.

The step that matters

Stirring lightly when spooning in each colored batter. Overmixing develops gluten and deflates the whipped egg whites, which makes the cakes dense and can blur the color layers.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Spinachthe original

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