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Dessert

Snow Cake

A light, airy cake made with butter, flour, corn starch, sweet milk, baking powder, egg whites, sugar, and flavored with icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Snow 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.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a large bowl.

  2. Stir in the flour until well combined.

  3. Add the corn starch and mix thoroughly.

  4. Dissolve the baking powder in the sweet milk and add to the mixture.

  5. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form, then gradually add the sugar and continue beating until well combined.

  6. Fold the egg white mixture into the batter gently.

  7. Add flavoring to taste.

Bake and assemble

  1. Pour the batter into baking sheets and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

  2. Once cooled, assemble the layers with icing.

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

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 and add richness and tender texture.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it sets.
Corn starch
Softens the crumb, giving a finer, more tender texture than flour alone.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they trap air that lightens and lifts the batter.

The step that matters

Fold the egg white mixture into the batter gently. Overmixing knocks out the air whipped into the egg whites, so the cake bakes up dense instead of light and airy.

“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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