Why it works: Milk and butter match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 81,222 recipes mention both. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓
The recipe
Ingredients
Contains: egg, milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)
Directions
Make the cake
Beat two coffee cups of sugar and one teacup of butter together until a thick cream forms.
Combine one coffee cup of corn starch, two teacups of sifted flour, two teaspoonfuls of cream tartar, one teaspoonful of soda, one cup of sweet milk, and the whites of seven eggs beaten very thoroughly with an egg-beater, adding any preferred essence. Stir the mixture rapidly and well.
Bake the batter in pans twelve inches long by eight inches wide, as thick as for a "jelly cake," and place the pans on pieces of tin slightly larger than the pans.
Frost and assemble
Prepare frosting by mixing one pound of fine sifted treble refined sugar with the whites of five eggs and the same essence used in the cake.
Assemble the cake by placing two layers together with frosting of the same thickness between them.
Trim and cut
When the cake is cold, trim the edges with a sharp knife (or when ready to serve), then cut it down the center and across three times to create little cakes four inches by three inches.
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. See the original page.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.
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Milk + buttertop 3% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together81,222 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
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Cream + buttertop 3% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together41,494 recipes
Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
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Milk + coffeetop 4% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together2,201 recipes
Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).
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Milk + corntop 4% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together6,953 recipes
Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).
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Cream + sugartop 5% of all pairsAroma overlapmoderateMentioned together43,437 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Cream of tartar
- Acidifies the batter so it reacts with soda to lift and lighten the crumb.
- Baking soda
- Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that makes the cake rise.
- Eggs
- Whipped whites add air and structure to the batter and to the frosting.
- Sugar
- Creamed with butter to trap air and add sweetness and tenderness to the cake.
- Butter
- Creamed with sugar to add richness, fat, and a tender crumb.
- Corn starch
- Lightens the crumb and softens the texture by diluting the flour's gluten.
The step that matters
Stir the batter rapidly and well. Acid and soda begin reacting as soon as they meet liquid, so the batter should be mixed promptly and thoroughly and baked without delay to keep the gas bubbles that give the cake its rise.
“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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