Skip to main content
Dessert

Banana Short-cake

A baked cake made with flour, baking powder, shortening, bananas, orange, sugar, sweet cream, and optional egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Banana and orange are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,118 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Banana Short-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 dough

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

  2. In a bowl, mix flour and baking powder.

  3. Cut in the shortening until crumbly.

  4. Add enough milk to form a moist dough.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Slice the bananas and orange.

  2. Grate the orange rind.

  3. Mix the fruit with sugar and set aside.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake the cake until golden.

  2. Split the cake in half.

  3. Butter the inside.

  4. Fill with the fruit mixture.

  5. Whip the egg white and mix with sweet cream.

  6. Add the mixture to the cake.

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. Banana + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + bananatop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,725 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the cake once baked.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Shortening
Coats flour particles to keep the crumb tender and short.
Bananas
Add moisture, sweetness and flavour to the filling.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and moisture to the topping mixture.
Egg white
When whipped, traps air to lighten the cream mixture.

The step that matters

Cut in the shortening until crumbly. Stop once the mixture looks crumbly. Fat coating the flour limits gluten development, so overworking makes the cake tough rather than tender.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Orangethe original

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

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipes