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Dessert

Delicate Cake

A light cake made with sugar, flour, butter, egg whites, flavored to taste, and iced with cream frosting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Delicate Cake

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Delicate 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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cream the butter until smooth.

Make the batter

  1. Add half of the flour to the creamed butter.

  2. In a separate bowl, beat the sugar and egg whites together.

  3. Gradually mix part of the sugar and egg mixture into the flour and butter mixture.

  4. Continue adding the remaining sugar and egg mixture and flour until fully combined.

  5. Flavor the batter to taste.

Bake and ice

  1. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake until golden.

  2. Once cooled, ice with Cream Frosting.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Butter
Creamed with the sugar base, it adds richness and a tender crumb to the cake.
Egg whites
Beaten with the sugar, they add structure and lift to the batter.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps give the cake a golden browning as it bakes.

The step that matters

Gradually mixing the egg and sugar mixture into the flour and butter. Adding the egg mixture slowly helps it blend evenly without deflating, keeping the batter smooth and light rather than separated or dense.

“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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