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Dessert

Rocky Mountain Cake

A cake made with sugar, butter, flour, eggs, baking powder, salt, flavoring, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Rocky Mountain Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

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

  2. Add flavoring to the mixture.

  3. Sift the flour, salt, and baking powder together.

  4. Add the beaten eggs and part of the flour to the mixture.

  5. Stir in the milk and the remaining flour.

  6. Beat the batter thoroughly for 10 minutes.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into loaf, layer, or gem tins and bake until golden.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.
All-purpose flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the cake its body and crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor, and traps air when creamed with sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender, browned crust when creamed with butter.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.

The step that matters

Beat the batter thoroughly for 10 minutes. Beating develops gluten in the flour, which gives structure and a firmer crumb. Over-beating can make the cake tough, so beat for the full time but no longer, and stop once the batter is smooth and uniform.

“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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