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Dessert

White Cake with Filling

A light white cake layered with a pineapple filling made from whipped egg whites and sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

White Cake with Filling

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.

Make the cake

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

  2. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

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

  4. Add the milk and mix well.

  5. Sift the flour with the baking powder and gradually add to the mixture.

  6. Add flavoring to taste and mix until smooth.

  7. Divide the batter into three greased cake pans and bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, beat the 2 egg whites until stiff.

  2. Boil 1 cup of sugar in ½ cup of boiling water until it threads.

  3. Pour the hot syrup over the beaten egg whites and whip until smooth.

  4. Fold in the grated pineapple.

Assemble

  1. Once the cake layers are cool, spread the filling between the layers.

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

Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they add lift and a light, airy structure to the cake and filling.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air, giving the cake a tender, fine crumb and rich flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, boiled into syrup, sets the texture of the fluffy filling.
All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the cake once its proteins set in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps form a smooth batter that bakes into a tender cake.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar syrup to the threading stage. Syrup that is undercooked will not set the whipped egg whites into a stable, fluffy filling, while overcooked syrup turns the filling hard and grainy as it cools.

Swap the pineapple

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

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

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