Skip to main content
Dessert

Pine-apple Cake

A cake made with butter, sugar, milk, flour, eggs, baking powder, grated pineapple, and optional pineapple jam layers.

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 ↓

Pine-apple 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 the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the cake

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

  2. Add the milk, flour, baking powder, egg whites, and egg yolks; mix well.

  3. Pour the batter into jelly cake pans and bake until golden.

Fill and frost

  1. Grate the pineapple and sprinkle it with sugar.

  2. Spread the grated pineapple between the cake layers.

  3. Beat 2 tablespoons of grated pineapple into the frosting before applying.

  4. Frost the outside of the cake with your preferred 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.

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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air, giving the cake a light, tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown while creaming with butter for lightness.
Flour
Forms the cake's main structure once its proteins set during baking.
Egg whites
Add structure and lift to the batter as they set in the oven.
Egg yolks
Add richness, moisture and tenderness to the crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to make the cake rise.

The step that matters

Bake until golden. Baking until golden, rather than shorter or longer, sets the structure while keeping the crumb moist; underbaking can collapse the layers and overbaking dries them out.

Swap the pineapple

The recipe marks pineapple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, milk, flour, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, milk, flour, egg. 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 pineapple cake recipes

Filling 4 See all 45 →

You might also like

Pineapple SherbetPineapple Sherbet116 recipesPineapple PuddingPineapple Pudding72 recipesPineapple CreamPineapple Cream58 recipesPineapple JellyPineapple Jelly39 recipes