Skip to main content
Dessert

Banana Cream Cake

A cake made with butter, milk, sugar, flour, eggs, baking powder, bananas, and topped with whipped cream.

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

Banana Cream Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the beaten eggs and stir in the milk.

  3. Sift the flour and baking powder together several times, then fold into the mixture and mix well.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake until golden brown.

  2. Once cooled, cover the cake with sliced bananas and top with whipped cream.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Milk + bananatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,470 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to make the cake rise and turn light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a soft, tender texture when creamed with butter.
Milk
Adds moisture and liquid so the flour hydrates into a smooth batter.

The step that matters

Sifting and folding the flour and baking powder. Overmixing once the flour is added develops gluten and makes the cake tough, so fold gently and only until combined. Sifting evenly distributes the baking powder so the cake rises uniformly.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Bananathe original

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

You might also like

Banana FillingBanana Filling16 recipesBanana SherbetBanana Sherbet10 recipesBanana FloatBanana Float9 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes