Name: Ice Cream Cake
Ingredients: 1 sponge cake (made from recipe No. 2); 1 pint thick sweet cream; Sugar to taste; Vanilla extract; 1 pound almonds

Why it works: Vanilla and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,961 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Ice Cream Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Bake a sponge cake in three deep jelly tins and cool thoroughly.
Blanch and finely chop the almonds.

Make the almond cream

Beat the thick sweet cream with sugar to taste and flavor with vanilla.
Stir the chopped almonds into the cream.

Assemble

Spread the almond cream thickly between the layers of cake and on top.

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.

Vanilla + almondtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,961 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together35,032 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Cream + vanillatop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12,301 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).
Cream + almondtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,130 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Thick sweet cream: Whipped into a rich base that gives the filling its body and creamy texture.
Almonds: Add nutty flavor and a slight crunch to the cream once finely chopped.
Sponge cake: Provides the light, airy layers that hold the almond cream between them.